Last night was no exception. The batteries pooped on the deck and what happens...I lose all data from the show. Man, is this the new world of recording? Do I have to be PERFECT or risk losing everything? I'm getting frustrated over here and may switch back to DAT. I just don't want to deal with the headaches of converting all the audio to .wav.
Wow, I want to see batteries crap all over a deck.
I think you meant popped...
But I'm also missing something. I think what you are looking for is something that doesn't exist at least in the FAT-16/32 world. You want a recorder that records and if you have sudden failure, you can recover everything up to that point. MARF does that, but that is a proprietary format developed by Zaxcom for the Deva and you don't even want to think about how much that will set you back. The biggest flaw in the current crop of hard drive recorders is that they all use common FAT-16/32 formats, which is not a fault-tolerant format. That doesn't mean you have to give up on the current crop of recorders, but you do have to be aware of certain things. One of the nice things the SD 7xx series (Aaton Cantar, Zaxcom Deva, and a few others) does is it allows you to record to multiple medias, so if you are recording on the internal drive and an external drive, you at least have the opportunity of trying to salvage the audio from two sources.
The bottom line is hard drive recording does take a bit more care than DAT. But really it's not much more care, and the fact that you no longer have to transfer data real-time like you did with DAT helps a lot.
I'm sure others with more experience with other recorders will chime in here.
Wayne