Backup for Accountants: Creating the Perfect Backup Plan for CPAs

When consumers need help managing their finances in their daily lives, they may first seek out a certified public accountant to track their money. CPAs work with a wide variety of clients who all hand over their sensitive information relating to their banking, income, and other personal data. As such, these types of files make CPAs very lucrative targets for hackers, and information could be very damaging to lose during an attack or natural disaster. By creating the perfect backup plan, CPAs can protect themselves and their customers from these threats.

Bridge the GAPP

There are a number of industry standards that have been established to help CPAs secure their systems and ensure that their data is protected. Since CPAs deal in managing financial information and likely accept credit cards for payment, they must adhere to PCI DSS guidelines in safeguarding this data. This could mean leveraging strong encryption for backups, enforcing secure authentication, and regularly testing recovery procedures, among other measures, to ensure that sensitive cardholder data is never exposed during backup, storage, or restore operations.

Besides PCI compliance, CPAs should aim to follow the rules of the Generally Accepted Privacy Principles (GAPP), set by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants. These guidelines outline 10 focus areas, including backup policies, management and access to documents, quality and integrity of information, and privacy. In practice, this means defining who is allowed to access backup data, how long information is retained, how it is disposed of, and what controls are in place to protect it both on-site and in the cloud.

The criteria under each principle go further in depth to put CPAs on the right path when backing up their data and ensuring that it has the required security. For example, they encourage firms to document backup responsibilities, encrypt data at rest and in transit, keep detailed logs of backup and restore activities, and regularly review whether backup processes still meet evolving regulatory and client expectations. By aligning backup processes with these principles, firms can demonstrate that they take privacy and data protection seriously, which is increasingly important during audits and client reviews.

Following GAPP will support CPAs in their effort to protect financial information and survive a potential disaster. It provides a structured framework for designing backup and recovery processes that do more than simply copy files—they help ensure that client information remains confidential, available when needed, and intact after an outage, cyberattack, or hardware failure. When combined with modern backup solutions that support encryption, off-site and cloud storage, and rapid restore options, GAPP can serve as a practical roadmap for building a resilient, compliant data protection strategy.

Accountants should use GAPP standards to protect their backups.

Create a detailed policy

One of the most critical aspects for any business is making a policy that clearly states what the organization is going to do to back up and protect its information. This plan should be written, communicated to all relevant staff, and reviewed on a regular basis so it stays aligned with regulatory requirements and evolving business needs. It can include formalizing when backups will occur, what systems and data sets will be backed up, where they will be stored, and who will be responsible for monitoring, testing, and maintaining this strategy.

Optimistically, your strategy will include the 3-2-1 rule, where you create three copies of your data, using two different types of media, keeping one copy off-site or in the cloud for true geographic redundancy.

At a minimum, your backup policy should answer the question: “What do we back up, how often, where does it go, and who owns it?” This includes defining recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs) for different data types, specifying encryption standards for data in transit and at rest, and outlining how long backups are retained before being securely deleted. For CPA firms in particular, the policy should explicitly address how client financial data, tax records, email, working papers, and practice management systems are protected, and how access to those backups is controlled and audited.

AccountingWEB noted that the off-site aspect will be key to disaster recovery, especially if your physical site and copies are destroyed or compromised. Off-site storage may include a secure cloud backup service, a secondary office location, or a purpose-built data center environment that meets applicable compliance standards. However, the local copy can be critical for immediate restoration needs since you'll be able to restore large volumes of data faster than you would from an off-site resource.

For example, if a file server fails during tax season, having a current local backup image can make the difference between being down for hours versus days. It’s obvious that both methods have critical parts to play in backup efforts and should be incorporated in CPA recovery strategies, particularly for time-sensitive operations like payroll, tax filings, and financial reporting.

Testing and Validation

Beyond where backups are stored, the policy should also include a clear testing and validation schedule. "Once a disaster occurs, it is often too late to test the restore process on your backup system," AccountingWEB stated. "Regularly restore sample files from your backups to validate that the restore process works and that it functions according to your expectations."

In practice, this means performing periodic test restores of individual files, entire folders, and, at planned intervals, full system or virtual machine restores. These tests should be documented, including who performed them, what was restored, how long it took, and whether any issues were encountered, so that gaps can be identified and corrected before a real incident.

Final Thoughts

CPAs have several considerations to make when it comes to protecting client financial information. They must ensure that backups are encrypted, that access to backup consoles and data is limited to authorized personnel, and that backup storage locations meet the requirements of GAPP, PCI DSS, and any other applicable regulations.

The policy should also define how backups are handled when staff leave the firm, when client engagements end, and when data must be archived or securely destroyed. By following the guidelines set by GAPP and creating a comprehensive backup policy, CPAs will have a better direction for implementing security across their files and ensuring that they have protection in place to prevent their essential data from being compromised. A well-defined, tested, and consistently enforced backup policy ultimately becomes a key part of a firm’s overall risk management and business continuity plan.

To learn more about backup solutions tailored to the needs of accountants, visit our CPA backup page and speak to one of our US-based backup experts.