@jen an sdf project can be as ephemeral as you’d like. I used to store all the exportable objects from clients in 1 project/client (essentially where you were at in eclipse) but when i deployed anything, i created a new (temporary) ‘project’, copied the file(s) from that all-the-objects project that i’d changed and/or needed to deploy to the account (you can copy/paste or drag/drop in eclipse), use the add dependencies functionality,deploy then trash your ‘temp’ project. it’s not perfect at all, and gets increasingly difficult as the complexity of the environment builds, but it’s worked pretty well for me in the past.