Should I Delete Old or Empty Catalogs to Free Space on Hard Drive?

Somehow I ended up with three catalogs in LR 4 -- Catalog.lrcat, Catalog-2.lrcat and Catalog-3.lrcat.   My original catalog in LR3 was Catalog.lrcat.  When I upgraded to LR4, Catalog-2.lrcat was created, and this is the catalog that I use.  I'm not sure how Catalog-3 was created, but all of the images are grayed out and have question marks on them. 
I would like to free up some space on my hard drive by getting rid of -- deleting -- Catalog (104MB) and Catalog-3 (103MB).  Is this not recommended?  And exactly how do I go about deleting a catalog?

Here's one way to do it (year-by-year archives):
* select the year's photos
* choose export as catalog:
export to whereever you'd like to keep such stuff.
Here's another way:
* simply copy your active catalog folder to whereever you'd like to keep such stuff (exit Lightroom first).
The first way, you'll have multiple archive catalogs, one for each year. You'd never fall back to one of these, but you may import from them.
The second way, you'll also have multiple catalogs, each will be bigger by amount added since last archive... Again, you are unlikely to fall back to one of these, but you could, especially if you save xmp too, in which case you could recover most work by falling back to most recent archive catalog and read xmp metadata for all photos edited since then.
Different folks like different strokes - if you invent another scheme you prefer - do share it. For example you may want to archive just the lrcat file (e.g. as backed up by Lr), or maybe the whole cat folder (except for previews). Also, you may want to archive other user files too, e.g. as backed up by "Aux Backup" plugin. Note: if you use the first approach, you can backup photo source files in with the archived catalog (which is one reason I recommend it - a catalog with no photo files is about as much fun as a dead puppy...). If you use the second approach, you'll need a different plan for saving associated master image files (lest your archived storage grow like streganona's spaghetti pot ;-}).
Hope this helps,
Rob

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