If you look, you can almost always find a "hook" to market your hypnosis practice.

April is National Stress Awareness Month in the United States, and April 16 is National Stress Awareness Day.

Offer free talks on stress management or discounts for people who come in for stress management or whatever you can come up with to tie into the theme and get you publicity and more business.

Fires! Floods! Hurricanes! Earthquakes! Tsunamis! Riots! Looting! What will you do?!?

I'm not going to apologize for the sensationalism you just read because this is important stuff you need to think about and act upon.

There are wildfires in California right now. Here in New Hampshire we've had severe springtime flooding for a few years. Other natural and man-made disasters happen all the time all over the globe. What if one happens that impacts your hypnosis office?

If your skills as a hypnotist are your most valuable asset, your data is a very close second, and quite often it's not protected against loss.

Think about your data for a moment. There's the data you use to practice hypnosis - scripts, videotapes, DVDs, CDs, etc. There's also data you create during your practice - client records, personal and professional contact information, session video recordings, e-mails, financial records, advertisements, etc. And sometimes there's data for products you've created - books, CDs, videotapes, DVDs, etc. That's a lot of valuable data. Where would your practice be if it all went away? Do you think it would be a good idea to protect that data?

Step 1 - Backups:

I know there are some of you who aren't backing up your data. It's simply not something that people think about. In my experience (which goes back over 25 years) there are two kinds of data: Data that you have backed up, and data that you will eventually lose. If you're not backing your data up (i.e. making copies of it to something NOT inside your computer) you're eventually going to lose it when a disk drive dies or you accidentally delete something.

Copy your data to an external hard disk or burn it to CDs or DVDs so you have permanent copies of it. Then if your hard drive dies or you accidentally delete something, you can get the data back from your copies.

Remember that you need to make copies of all new and changed data periodically. Making a copy of everything today is great, but if you're adding new data or changing data, you need to make copies on a regular schedule to keep your backups up to date.

Step 2 - Offsite Backups:

A regular backup schedule protects you against accidental data loss due to disk failure or accidental deletion, but what about a disaster that destroys your office, including the computers AND the backup copies? That's where you need offsite copies of your backups.

Remember, your skills and your data are both irreplaceable. You can build a new home, lease a new office, buy new computers and furniture, and get yourself back in business IF you still have your data. If your data is gone, you're going to have to start over from scratch. Many companies don't survive a disaster, simply because they've lost their data. Everything else can be recreated from scratch, but your data cannot.

Offsite backups are simple. All you do is make an extra copy of your backups and take them somewhere else. If your office is a reasonable distance from your home, you could bring a copy of your backups home and put it in a file cabinet. If the office is in your home or next door, you probably want to find another location for your offsite backups, in case there's a disaster that affects more than one building. If your data is all on computers, you might be able to put an external hard disk or a set of CDs or DVDs in a bank safe deposit box for an offsite backup. If you have photocopied paper data (paper data is important, too) then it might be too big to fit into a safe deposit box and you may need to look into companies who specialize in offsite record storage.

Your offsite backup schedule will usually be less frequent than your in-house backup schedule. Maybe you'll end up doing in-house backups daily and offsite copies will go out weekly or monthly. It all depends on how important it is to you to keep your offsite data up to date and how often you feel it's reasonable to drive to the offsite backup location with a copy of your backups.

Step 3 - Data Destruction:

Sometimes you need to destroy data. Maybe it's obsolete and just taking up space. Maybe there are legal requirements for you to destroy client data after a certain period in your locale. Whatever the reasons, if it's data that could be considered confidential by anyone (whether or not the law considers it confidential information) simply chucking it in a garbage bag and throwing it out isn't the way to handle it. Get a good shredder and use it to make your paper and optical (CD/DVD) data useless before you throw it out.

That's my entire disaster recovery rant. It's important stuff that people usually don't think about until it's too late. My final word of advice on this is to occasionally make sure that you can actually read the data back from your backups. I once worked with a guy who lost his job because he'd never checked to see if his backups were viable and when his building had a file server die they discovered that a defective tape drive had been writing absolute garbage to their backup tapes for months. Do backups regularly, take copies offsite, and check occasionally to make sure that the data on them is good and you'll be doing a great job of ensuring that you can stay in business even if a disaster strikes.