If Your Accounting Data Is Lost, Can You Recover It?

An untested backup is a belief, not a control, and the difference becomes apparent at the worst possible moment.

The test that settles it

Pick a date three months ago. Ask whoever manages your systems to restore your accounting data as it stood on that date, to somewhere you can open it.

Then time how long it takes and check whether the data is complete.

That single exercise tells you more than any policy document. Run it once a year.

What usually goes wrong in that test

The backup was running but did not include the accounting database.

The backup was to a drive attached to the same machine, which ransomware also encrypts.

Nobody knows the credentials for the backup system because the person who set it up has left.

The restore works but takes four days, which is longer than your business can operate blind.

The backup is a sync, not a backup. A synced folder faithfully replicates the encryption of your files within minutes.

What a real backup looks like

Three copies of the data. On two different types of storage. One of them off-site and not permanently connected.

That last part matters most against ransomware. Anything permanently connected gets encrypted along with everything else.

Cloud accounting helps here, but read your provider's terms. Most protect against their own failure, not against you deleting your own data or an attacker using your credentials to do it.

Ransomware, specifically

The attacker encrypts your files and asks for payment.

Two things to know in advance.

Paying does not reliably work, and it marks you as a business that pays.

Your decision comes down entirely to whether you can restore. That is decided months earlier by whether the backups were real, not on the day.

The other loss nobody plans for

Not attackers. Departure.

The bookkeeper who kept everything in one spreadsheet on their own machine. The subscription in a former employee's personal email. The system nobody else has credentials for.

List every system holding your financial data, who has access, and where the credentials are held. Most small businesses cannot produce that list, and the exercise of trying is worth the time.

The basics that prevent most incidents

Two-factor authentication on email and on your accounting system. Access removed the day someone leaves, not the month after.
Software updates applied rather than deferred indefinitely.
Nobody working day to day in an administrator account.

What to do this month

Run the restore test. That is the whole recommendation.

If it works, you have proved something. If it does not, you have found out while it is still cheap to fix.

Where we fit

We hold client accounting data and are asked about our own arrangements regularly, which is a fair question to ask any firm handling your books. Ask it.