In other words, I’m in the habit of saving a project every few minutes, just in case there’s a crash or some sort of glitch. When I do that, is sonar saving just the new work I’ve done since the last save , or is it re-saving the entire project again?

I have a 500 gig SSD and don’t want to unnecessarily fill it up. I also have a larger HDD. Should I be saving my cakewalk projects to that drive instead? Will this impact data throughput to cakewalk? Thanks.

No. Audio is left alone. Only edits and other data is written to the Sonar file. The file is rewritten. 

All of the project data is saved each time so that the entire project can be reconstructed from the file. Audio data is saved externally to this file, but it is only saved once and then referenced from the file. It is best to have Sonar save your audio and file in a project folder rather than have the audio saved to a different location which is an option. It's a good idea to have your projects saved on a different disc - for example, my system disk is an SSD, but my projects are saved on a larger HDD. You also have an option to automatically save versions which can be useful.

Save cakewalk bundles periodically and back them up to Google drive or something to preserve your audio files.  Disks crash, SSD fail, computers die.  

mritenburg
Save cakewalk bundles periodically and back them up to Google drive or something to preserve your audio files.  Disks crash, SSD fail, computers die.  

And cwb's can become corrupted
When this happens you have lost the entire project
Saving as a cwp mitigates this to some extent as you will still be able to access the raw audio tracks in the event of s project corruption

Does repeated saving of a project replicate the entire data file?

No, but "Save As" does and you should select a different hard drive to save your project with 'save as"
 
CJ

35mm
All of the project data is saved each time so that the entire project can be reconstructed from the file. Audio data is saved externally to this file, but it is only saved once and then referenced from the file. It is best to have Sonar save your audio and file in a project folder rather than have the audio saved to a different location which is an option. It's a good idea to have your projects saved on a different disc - for example, my system disk is an SSD, but my projects are saved on a larger HDD. You also have an option to automatically save versions which can be useful.

Thanks everyone!

Re: “It is best to have Sonar save your audio and file in a project folder rather than have the audio saved to a different location which is an option. It's a good idea to have your projects saved on a different disc - for example, my system disk is an SSD, but my projects are saved on a larger HDD.”

So saving the project file to the slower HDD, while Sonar software remains on SSD, doesn’t negatively impact anything? It could obviously save a lot of space on the SSD over time.