Merging / combining projects and components into single project

[XavierWalker]

When I started using F360, I hadn't undersood properly the management side of projects, files, components.

As a result, I have mistakenly created three different designs for a single product: a design for a "B" base, a second design for a "C" cover and a third design "A" for the assembly.

I want to have all of these under a single design.

I was hoping that I could do this by importing the components into the "assembly" design so A includes B and C, then unlinking them making new instances of B and C meaning the original B and C design files could be deleted.

However, this doesn't appear to work: I cannot delete the original design files as it says they are in use / being referenced.

Upon further inspection, this appears to be the case because they were referenced in previous versions of other designs. As I no longer want to use B and C in these other designes, I have removed them from the other designs, but the removal results in the need to save to a new version so you can never really remove something completely if at any point point in time it was in the design history. This seems crazy!

The only solution I can see is starting again from scratch. Surely there's another way so I don't lose hours of design work?

What am I missing?

[XavierWalker]

To illustrate.

I've now taken the base design and have exported it as a backup.

I believe it's no longer used anywhere. If I go online and view in web browser, I have this:

In the web view, I click on the three dots top right and go to delete.

No can do:

Why?

[jeff_strater · Accepted solution]

You can export your entire design as a "Fusion Archive", then re-upload it to a new project or folder.  This effectively gets rid of all past versions in the new design, so there are no more remaining old references to the designs that you want to delete.  Then, go back and delete your old design from the top down (delete the very top assembly, then any sub-assemblies, etc)

The main limitation with this method is: it will not bring along any drawings.  I think there are ways around that, by changing the reference of a drawing, but I am not familiar with that workflow.

[XavierWalker]

Thank you @jeff_strater , I've been able to export the various components / projects into new separate entities and it's cleaned up the versions as you said. I don't have any drawings yet so not worried about that.

So that's great.

However, I still cannot delete the old projects which are now no longer used anywhere else, any links have been totally severed.

For example, this item:

is not used anywhere.

So I attempt to delete this. But it won't let me:

Why ?

[XavierWalker]

Hmm after a while, it seems to have sorted itself out and I've been able to delete old items. Strange. Maybe the cloud thing needs a few minutes to sync?