I totally get the tension, but I’d lean hard toward the raw master on those three tiered drives. Live streaming looks great, but every bit of compression leaves a dent you can’t ever undo. If the cloud goes down one day, you still have the pristine source. Keep the master in the highest quality codec you’ve ever used—no re‑encoding, no “just‑for‑web” tricks. That way you can always go back, tweak, or re‑stream later with the best possible fidelity. Trust me, the loss of that original is a permanent compromise I don’t want to make.

I’ll add a tiny, uncompressed snapshot to the cloud, just in case the local tiered drives start glitching. But make sure it’s a one‑off raw copy—no re‑encoding, no extra compression. The real strategy is keeping that pristine master safe on the physical drives, then a tiny, hard‑copy backup on the cloud as the last safety net. That way the bulk of the work stays in a format I trust, and the cloud is only a backup, not the primary.