For tax and accounting firms, data is your business. Client financial records, tax returns, payroll data, and business documents represent thousands of hours of work. Losing that data to hardware failure, ransomware, or accidental deletion can be catastrophic, both financially and reputationally.
The 3-2-1 Backup Rule
The gold standard for data backup is the 3-2-1 rule: maintain three copies of your data, stored on two different types of media, with one copy kept offsite. For a typical accounting firm, this means your working files on your server, a local backup on a network-attached storage device, and a cloud backup that replicates automatically.
Why three copies? Because any single backup can fail. Hard drives crash, cloud services experience outages, and ransomware can encrypt both your primary data and any backup drives connected to the same network. Having three copies across different locations makes total data loss virtually impossible.
Cloud Backup vs. Local Backup
Cloud backup services automatically encrypt and upload your data to secure data centers. The advantages are clear: no hardware to maintain, automatic scheduling, offsite protection, and the ability to restore from anywhere. For accounting firms handling sensitive financial data, look for cloud backup providers that offer AES-256 encryption and SOC 2 compliance.
Local backups provide faster restore times for large datasets. If you need to recover 500 GB of data, downloading it from the cloud could take hours, while restoring from a local device takes minutes. The best strategy uses both: cloud backup for disaster protection and local backup for fast day-to-day recovery.
Testing Your Backups
A backup that hasn’t been tested is a backup you can’t trust. Schedule quarterly restore tests where you actually recover files from your backups and verify they’re complete and usable. Many businesses discover their backups have been silently failing for months only when they desperately need them.
During tax season, increase your backup frequency. Daily backups should run for all active client files, with real-time or hourly backup for your accounting software database. The few hours of work lost between backups during a busy tax season could mean days of rework.
Backup Retention and Compliance
Tax and accounting firms have specific data retention requirements. The IRS recommends keeping tax records for a minimum of three years from the filing date, though some situations require seven years or longer. Your backup strategy needs to accommodate these retention periods with archived copies that remain accessible but don’t consume your primary backup storage.
Consider implementing tiered backup retention: daily backups kept for 30 days, monthly backups kept for one year, and annual backups kept for seven years. Automated backup software can manage these retention schedules without manual intervention, ensuring compliance without adding to your team’s workload.
