For the first time we have decided to offer a promotion for appointments scheduled in the month of January. If you are a bride and are getting married in Riverside County or Orange County, log on to our website and fill out the contact us form and we will send you our special promotion. Be sure to include "Blog" in the comments section as well as the best time to contact you. There are limited appointments so don't delay!

www.franksaldana.com/

Have a great day!

Blogging makes me realize how quickly time flies. It is easy to get caught up in editing images along with other aspects of the business. Before you know it a week has gone by since the last post!

Since Sarah and Kevin's wedding is less than a week away, I figured I would post some of their engagement images. I will be sure to follow up shortly with some images of their wedding. Sarah and Kevin love to go camping, running and hiking. We figured it was important to reflect this in their engagement images so we went to the local mountains and created some great images that capture what they love about the mountains....nature.

Have a great day!

As some of you know my MacBook Pro recently died. The hard drive failed and I lost some data...or so I thought. Before my hard drive failed I was doing my routine backup (with Leopard's new Time Machine) but the huge life saver was my external 3.75 Terabyte Storage Device. Time Machine burns through hard drive space like nothing I've ever used. Fortunately I had the space to allow Time Machine to run the backups automatically without limiting the number of backups it runs.

Photographers know the key to safeguarding files is redundancy. I've had enough drives fail on me to know that it is not if a hard drive will fail but when. With that I set out in purchasing a storage device that would work for me, yet I didn't see much geared toward wedding photographers. The system I have is the perfect setup and I couldn't be happier with it.

I would now like introduce my new website designed for photographers. The website is called PhotogSolutions. The site is currently dedicated to Turnkey Storage Devices. It is now easy for other photographers to log in and purchase a device that will provide invaluable peace of mind. The XP-5 allows clients to purchase 3.75 Terabytes of storage for $1,999. BH Photo Video sells a comparable system, the CalDigit 3.75 Terabyte Array for $2,849.95 (price as of 1/4/08). This price does not include a 6ft eSata cable and does not come with the cool LCD readouts (which have an alarm that can be programmed to go off if the drives get too hot) . This is over an $800 savings! The following is an image of the storage device:

*****WARNING the following is somewhat technical...it may put you to sleep if you are not into computer hardware. Read at your own risk =)***********

The drives can be swapped in and out. The top 2 drives in the enclosure are striped together as one (Main Drive). The second two are striped together (Backup 1). The last drive is dedicated solely to 2 programs...time machine and Photoshop (as a scratch disk). Time Machine is set to backup and notify me when the last drive is almost full. I keep an eye on it so there is always enough room for the scratch disk.

The Main Drive has all my client files on it. It is backed up to Backup 1 every couple days. I have special software designed to run the backup which I usually perform when leaving the studio in the evening. I also have an extra 2 drives in separate trays (Backup 2) which I keep in a safe and swap out with Backup 1 weekly or after adding and event. This way if my Main Drives fail I have Backup 1 which I could just plug in and hit the ground running. If God forbid there was a fire and I was to lose my entire storage device with the 5 drives I would have a Backup in a safe.

Don't put off safeguarding your information. You never know when your hard drive is going to go. The following is a link to the new website:

www.PhotogSolutions.com

We also have an 8TB system which is on sale for under $4,000.