In my quest to keep a neat file system and conserving space, I want to be sure recorded over and unwanted tracks are gone forever once I click "save-as".  I remeber once having old tracks come back into my project for some unkown reason and I don't want that ever happening again.
Since I am now storing everything in per song/project folders I should be OK? 

Sonar does not erase those tracks. If you perform a "save as" and direct to a new location the old files are still right were you left them. 

If you perform a "save as" and stay in the same location , your going to have to re name the project, right? And the new named CWP file will use the audio folder sitting right there which still has all the waves from the original. 

There is a clean audio option but I have never used it because reports are that it is dicey on it's behavior. 

But if your a real clean freak and do not want to keep unwanted junk around best to do the "save as" to a new location. 
But!
Then I would double check that all is still good by returning to the original location and renaming the folder and move it to a safe place temporarily.  This will prevent Sonar  from finding it. 
Now open the new version and make sure all is present and accounted for. 
Now you can go and delete the old folder. 

Don't forget to also back up the new project to a second drive while your at it. 

So, you are saying that even though I re-save my project to the same file name it will not over write all my out take tracks, even the wiped tracks?  Since I am using per project folders, do the old wav files then find their way to the Global Audio folder instead?

Istvan


So, you are saying that even though I re-save my project to the same file name it will not over write all my out take tracks, even the wiped tracks?  Since I am using per project folders, do the old wav files then find their way to the Global Audio folder instead?

No. You can't save under the same file name to do the job, you have to add a "2" or whatever. The old audio files stay exactly where they were when recorded. If you "Save As" under a new name with "Copy All Audio With Project" the audio that is still included in the project will be copied in the new folder, and the originals and the ones that have been deleted from the project remain in the original folder, which you can delete.


This all is to make sure you don't delete important audio accidentally. As mentioned above, "Clean Audio Folder" is a function for deleting unused audio, but most forumites think it's slow and clumsy, because the scanning takes forever, and it searches all folders no matter what you tell it to do.

Sonar as far as I know does not truly overwrite files, It keeps a lot of stuff so you can go back, This is a good thing.. 

You know storage space is no longer an issue. So the only reason I tidy up is all about not getting different versions of songs mixed up. I don't  want to return to the wrong version of a song by mistake. So I don't leave unwanted versions around forever. I do a save as with a number , the highest number is obviously the last version. I then delete the old version during a housekeeping routine once a year or when installing a new data drive. I have every song I have ever worked on for 20 years and I think I have used 20% of a 1T Gig drive which I have 3 of.