Live Recording - Track to two hard drives in parallel as a backup?

[Jan1973]

Hello,

I'm recording quite a bit live. Ususally I bring my laptop (plus pres, mics, and interface) to the location and fire up either Cubase or Reaper to record.

I'm always a bit nervous about two things:

1) Power failures. Those can be dealt with to some degree using a UPS, at least to save everything already recorded
2) Hard disc failures. The only solution I can see here so far is a hard disk recorder I run the signal through that records in parallel. Quite expensive.

Now here is the question: is there any way in either Cubase or Reaper to save recorded channels to two hard disks in parallel? I.e. give two storage locations and save the wav's in both concurrently?

I mean this would not be too hard to pull off in software in theory and would save 2 HE of rackspace, quite some weight to drag around, and 1k Euros.

RAID would be a solution, but then I'd have to have 6 HDs in my rack machine I plan to buy. No way I'm gonna do that.

Two RAID disks (for performance) for the project with their audio, one for samples, and one for windows and apps are planned. If I want to use RAID also as a backup solution, I'd have six HDs in the machine. Noise, power consumption, and size somehow make me reluctant to that idea.

It would be so cool (and I think pretty simple to implement) if Cubase/Reaper/any other DAW could just write the tracks to one of the other two existing disks in parallel as a temporary backup till I have the data at home and safe on the server...

[timlloyd]

In Reaper, go to Project Settings and create a Secondary Record Path. Then, select all the tracks you want to backup, and run the "Track: Set record path to primary+secondary" action.

If you use that action a lot, it makes sense to add it to your contextual track menu as well.

[777Artin]

Un-professionnal back-up solution.

At the price of HD these days, just buy new ones every 6 months and use the "old" ones as back-up drives when session is done.

I've never had a disk error in years doing mobile work that way.

I do always record onto 2 seperate recorders, 1 main and the other as back-up........i sleep better before a gig

777artin

[phas3d]

If you are using OS X you just need 2 HDDs. Just run disk utility and set them as Mirrored RAID. If one fails the other is the exact duplicate. I would still backup to an external HDD at the end of each session, though. Never to careful with work!
That is my setup and it works great. I would rather have a 4 or 6 HDD array, but that's what I have for now.

[Jan1973]

Originally Posted by timlloyd

In Reaper, go to Project Settings and create a Secondary Record Path. Then, select all the tracks you want to backup, and run the "Track: Set record path to primary+secondary" action.

If you use that action a lot, it makes sense to add it to your contextual track menu as well.

Haaa, that's exactly what I wanted :-) Thanks a bunch. I had to update my Reaper to find it in the Action List.

Now, if Cubase had something like that too, I'd be in heaven; I can live with Reaper for the time being :-)