# How do I record my live streams? > You have a few routes and they are not exclusive: let the platform keep its own copy of the broadcast… Canonical URL: https://vivu.ai/guide/how-do-i-record-my-live-streams You have a few routes and they are not exclusive: let the platform keep its own copy of the broadcast, have your broadcast software write a local file to disk while it streams, or record the signal on separate hardware. For most people the local file is the copy worth setting up, because it is the one you control and the one that survives a platform changing its retention rules. The platform copy is the fastest thing to check, so start there and then decide whether you need the rest. ## Check what the platform already saved Most streaming platforms can keep the broadcast after it ends, and on several of them that is a setting rather than a default, with a retention window tied to your account level. Open those settings before your next stream rather than after the one you wish you had kept. Treat that copy as a convenience and not as an archive: what you get back is usually the transcoded broadcast rather than your source quality, and how long it lives is somebody else's decision. ## Record locally while you broadcast Most broadcast software can write a local file at the same time it sends the stream out, and that file can be better quality than what viewers received. Two things matter in practice. Write it to a different physical disk than the one your system runs from, and check free space before a long session instead of during it. A recording that dropped frames fails silently, and you find out in the edit. ## Record the signal separately If the streaming machine is the thing at risk, take the recording off it. A capture card in a second machine, or a standalone recorder sitting between your camera or switcher and the streaming PC, produces a file that does not care whether the broadcast crashed. The cost is one more device to arm before you go live and one more file to move afterward. ## The step that decides whether the recording is worth having Recording is the easy half. The problem that keeps coming back for people who capture a lot is that a good moment is obvious while it happens and unfindable weeks later: you know you said something worth clipping, and you are scrubbing a four-hour file looking for it. Two cheap habits help. Mark it in the moment, either with your encoder's marker key or by saying something you will recognise later, and keep the chat log, because chat reactions are a rough timestamp of everything you forgot to mark. The other route is to make the recording itself answerable. A retrieval layer indexes the video once and then takes a description instead of a timecode, handing back time ranges with a line on why each one matched, including one or two you will reject. Uploading a stream to a [Vivu](https://vivu.ai/platform) project works that way, so the moment you half remember becomes a sentence you type rather than a bar you drag. You open the ranges it returns, export the original segments, and cut them yourself. [Going back years rather than weeks](https://vivu.ai/guide/how-to-find-old-stream-moments-for-an) is the harder version of the same job. ## When you should not bother recording If you have never once opened a past stream, stop archiving them. Storage for multi-hour files is not free, moving them is a chore, and an unwatched archive quietly becomes a decision you keep deferring. The test is whether you have opened a recording from before last month for any reason. Live formats that exist for the people in the room at the time are allowed to be disposable. ## What to decide Pick your setup from what you plan to do with the file. If the stream is the product and it lives on the platform, the platform copy is enough and everything above is overhead. If you cut clips out of it, you want a local file at source quality plus some way back into the middle of it, and [the cutting stage](https://vivu.ai/guide/how-do-i-turn-a-6-hour-stream-into-short-clips) is where that choice pays off or does not. If you have been recording for a year and touched none of it, the recording setup is not the thing to fix, and [what is already sitting in your back catalogue](https://vivu.ai/guide/how-to-find-reusable-clips-in-my-youtube-back) is the better place to spend an afternoon. ## FAQ ### Can I rely on the platform's own archive as my only copy? Treat it as a convenience copy. Retention windows, quality, and whether archiving happens at all vary by platform and by account level, and they change without asking you. If a stream matters for anything later, you want a file you hold. The practical middle ground is to let the platform archive run for the ones you might use and keep local recordings for the ones you know you will. Download anything you care about while it still exists rather than trusting the window. ### Does recording locally hurt my stream quality? It can, because the local recording competes with the broadcast for the same CPU and the same disk. If your encoder is already close to its limit, adding a high-quality local file is how you start dropping frames on stream. The fixes are to record at a preset the machine can actually handle, write to a separate physical drive, or move recording to a second machine entirely. Watch your encoder's dropped-frame counter during a normal session before you trust the setup for anything important. ### I recorded a five-hour stream. How do I find the good parts without watching it again? Start with the signals you already have. Chat volume spikes, your own markers, and the VOD's own viewing graph will point at a handful of candidate spots in a few minutes, and that is often enough. When the thing you want is specific and you cannot remember when it happened, the options are a transcript search if it was said out loud, or a search tool that indexes the video and takes a description. Both hand you candidates, and you still open each one to check, since a plausible match and the actual moment are not the same thing. ### Should I record every stream or only the ones I plan to reuse? Record everything if the marginal cost is disk space, because the streams you would have chosen to keep are not the ones that turn out to matter. The moments people ask for later tend to be unplanned. Delete on a schedule instead of choosing at capture time. Keep a rolling window of everything, and only the streams you actually pulled something from beyond that. That way the decision is made with hindsight, which is the only time it is an easy decision.