fcp 6 autosave questions

i'm finishing a large, long term project in fcp v6 and have been running into some issues that may simply have to do with my improperly using some functionality due to my getting more deeply into the system than i ever have before.

the project has gotten quite large. current fcp project file is running just under 300mb. there have been problems of crashing that seem to be aleviated if i cull the project to make it smaller. to that end, i broke the project in three, splitting off two large pieces, and keeping the rest as the main project. the method i used to do this was to open the original project, then perform three 'save-as' procedures, saving once as 'project_main.fcp,' project_sub1.fcp,' and 'project_sub2.fcp.'

problem is that i can't find any autosaves for anything after the splitting. fcp does make me pause my editing while it goes through an autosave but, once that's been done, i don't find any autosave files with that timestamp anywhere. i've checked the autosave path and it is correct. nothing shows up in the original project's autosave folder and no new fcp documents folder have been created for the newly created main, sub1, or sub2 projects.

what is the correct way to do what i am trying to do? what have i missed? do i need to manually create some folders somewhere?

thanks for any guidance,
BabaG

BabaG: What you did is reasonable, and FCP7 does it fine. It doesn't seem possible that FCP6 can't do it, since every new project starts as a "save project as". (You're not running FCP6 under Mavericks, are you?) You can try opening a new project, copying one of the partial projects' contents into it, and saving that new new one.
Also are you sure you edited long enough to get an autosave? When I just now tried your routine in FCP7 I set the autosave time to 5 minutes, and I believe it took more than 5 minutes to get the first one.

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany