Today I open up my CbB project, and it does not contain the revisions I made last night. I discover it is not the same version, but an earlier one. Eventually I find the latest one in a folder with the title of the piece.
 
I save my work in "Michael" first, and then on an external drive for backup ("save as"). I know I have to then specify "Michael" again if I want to save there, or it will save in the default area, a Cakewalk folder. (I turn off the hard drive after saving there, as it has its own power supply, not to mention the fact that it's noisy).
 
In "Michael" I see I now have several versions of my project, all with recent but different dates/times.
 
What is going on here? How can I get control of this weird saving behavior?

My projects are all midi, I should have mentioned that. I just turned off the "save audio" option in the save dialogue, as I don't see that I need it. I think that's where the folder comes from, which seems to be the default place to save, unless you specify another location. So hopefully that will stop it from saving in that folder?

Yes , If your working with pure midi turn of the box that asks to save the Audio a you don't want that. Otherwise it does create a project folder. 
 
I have been using One Drive to save all my pure midi projects and it's Awesome. They are saved as CWP files and are small in size so upload and download fast.  You can't really do this with audio files as it would take too much bandwith. 
Using One Drive eliminates the need to back up to an external. 
The files are automaticly stored both Locally and on the cloud.
I have that folder synced to 2 other computers so whan I turn those computers on my files get downloaded.
I can work on my 2 different set ups and these songs are always my most up to date version. Old versions are still kept in standard data drives just in case. 
If I'm working with Audio I use standard drives and back up and I hate it.