Ever had one of your backup drives performing considerably slower than the others? It's a situation every video professional runs into sooner or later. Not all drives are made equally, after all.

The solution? Cascading.

With cascading copies, you first copy to your fastest drive. Then, you use that fast drive to copy to slower drives. This way, you free up your source earlier, making bandwidth available for the next source.

There are typically two hardware setups when handling data: either one of the destinations is way faster than the other(s), or one is slow. Let's have a look at how cascading helps in both situations.

Slow Horses

Let's say you have two fast drives as your primary backups. Maybe they're SSDs or RAIDs. Just before the shoot starts, the producer gives you a tiny spinning disk with USB 3.0 to be used as a travel drive 🤯

Before cascading, the slow drive would have held back the faster drives. With cascading, it all gets a lot faster:

Instead of transferring to all three destinations simultaneously, with the faster ones patiently waiting for the slower drive to finish its work, you tell OffShoot you want to cascade. First, set up a destination, and then drop your slow destination on top of the fast drive:

You can also use the context menu to achieve the same:

As soon as the source has finished copying to the fast destination(s), it starts copying to the travel drive.

With a standard OffShoot license you can cascade one destination, while with a PRO license you can have as many cascading destinations as you like:

When you have one drive that is way faster than all others, it's often a RAID. When you work like this, always use it as the primary destination and cascade your other drive(s) off it.

Just remember: as soon as you have a slow drive, cascade your copies!

The Fast And The Furious

Let's have a look at advanced cascading workflows, available for PRO users: Cascading Groups and Waterfalls.

For this next shoot, you told the producer you'd provide a proper travel drive - no more delays! You supply three identical SSDs, sufficiently large for today's shoot.

However, the director comes up to you with two cheap SSDs: "Can you make two copies for me on my brand new drives, for overnight reviews?"

Now, you'll want to copy to your fast drives simultaneously, then offload to the slower consumer SSDs. Depending on the performance of your fast drives, you could cascade to both slow drives from the same drive. But, you can also decide to spread the load:

Now, you have two destinations that each cascade to other drives - we call them Cascading Groups. Cascading Groups are independent of each other and can work in different modes. You can keep adding destinations as you like - there's no limit to the amount of groups:

The above mode is the most straightforward way, but there's another — waterfalls.

Waterfalls

What if you have to work with intrinsically slower destinations, like a cloud upload or network transfers? Or both? You'll want to cascade from one drive to the next, from there to the next, and so on:

Especially when working with cloud uploads, cascading to the cloud drive as the last step will save you a lot of time. Set up your fastest drive first, then the slower local drives, and last, your cloud uploads or network shares.

To set up Waterfall, drag your third drive on top of the second drive - that'll tell OffShoot to cascade from the secondary destination instead off the primary one. You can recognize a waterfall-ing drive by the arrow-signs in the UI:

Alternatively, you can select Cascade From in the drive menu to use Cascading's waterfall mode.

Lastly, you don't want to put a cloud destination like S3 somewhere in between the cascading line-up. It would take ages to read back all the data from the cloud, so we've prevented that from happening: you can only use S3 destinations as a final cascading item.

Line 'm up

Back in Jan 2023, we introduced Queuing's Single Destination mode. This feature was a first step towards Cascading, and has now become moot. If you feel yourself looking for it, use Cascading instead. We have left the other Queuing modes intact, as they still have a use - albeit less than before cascading arrived on the scene.

Get It Today

Cascading comes in two flavors, standard and Pro. If you have an OffShoot Pro license, all cascading options are available to you. Non-Pro users can cascade once, which will cover 90% of the times you'll need to cascade.

Cascading is available as of now for all Windows users in OffShoot 25.1. Update OffShoot in-app, or download a fresh installer if you prefer that. Got a license not eligible for this update? Extend it today in the License Manager.

We expect to release Cascading for macOS within a few weeks. If you have a license that's eligible for updates and support, go grab Beta 2 of Cascading on the Beta Track: https://docs.hedge.video/offshoot/beta-track