George your response is not useful and dismissive of the issue.  Lacerte is definitely making these backups and not some other program.  You may want to discuss this with your team.

Multiple users are finding finding these backups on their systems.  I contacted Lacerte support and was informed that Lacerte is making these back ups.  Another user contacted Lacerte support regarding this matter and posted their conversation on the LUTG

"So, I didn’t get a response from the email I sent so I went ahead and called support. I spoke with a helpful person, Angela, who, did tell me that she too hadn’t been told of this change. She had to put me on hold and go do research to find out what changed. Lacerte apparently swapped to a new database structure in 2021. They implemented this automatic backup routine inside the IDATA and PDATA folders because CLPACK apparently could not repair the databases on those two platforms and these backups are the solution."

My original question has not been answered:

Can an option be added to this automatic backup to direct the the location of the backup to a specific location? For example it is now backing up to our server but could it be directed to a local computer hard drive.