Archiving a Project with Resolve 16

I am a very very very new user, a still photographer diving headfirst into video.

I have created my first video for my company and now I want to archive it and move it to a server, however my workflow is a work in progress. I have all the media scattered in different folders, which wasn't a problem editing and delivering the finished work but now that I want to archive the project I consistently get error messages that Resolve can't find the media. I'm confused by that because the media is in my bins and timelines in the project.

Can anyone give me any advice about how to fix this problem? I can't leave this project on my local server and I don't want to lose all the work I've done. I've tried several fixes but I find media connectivity to be a giant secret with this software. Thanks in advance.

check make sure all media in the media pool exists
look in the media pool for offline media
if not wanted to add to an archive, remove it from the media pool
if wanted to add to the archive, relink to the orig file
hopefully this sorts the archive, i find that to be very reliable if the ducks are lined up first

if you have alot of media but only want to archive the media used in the master timeline i make a new project with matching framerate, copy the master timeline, and paste it into the new project, that moves only the media used in the timeline to the new project, and then i archive the new project

Thanks for your response. All of the media in the media in the media pool exists. I just can't figure this out.

Let me try to approach it from another direction: I know for sure I have all the media saved. If I export a .drp file for the project and I have all the media, would I be able to open that .drp file later and then relink the media if I needed to? Is that a solid backup workaround?

Since Archive can't find media, there's no assurance Media Management will either, but you could try to move all the footage to one location, with relinking selected (see the manual, for details). If that's successful, then you may be able to archive all the footage.

A .drp is a compressed backup of the project file. If the project can find the media and populate the timeline correctly, the .drp, when imported into a database, will as well.

Thank you for your reply. I relinked all the bins in the media pool and tried archiving again and presto, it worked.

Here's my next question: If I save that .dra file is it necessary to save the separate folder with all the footage in it, or is all my footage saved in the .dra archive?

I'm very concerned about carelessly tossing assets I might need later, while trying to establish best practices for saving projects in the future.