>Don't need to do anything fancy. The main reason I'm adding this is that a (ahem, naive) user ran the Setup twice accidentally, and overwrote her data with new empty tables. Just in case someone does this again...most stuff we keep on servers with backups, but not these small local tables...

What's in these small local tables? Could they be backed up to a server-resident database? Then you'd have a central way to manage the backups AND updates to the local files. The local files could be updated from the server with a parameterized view copied to the local table location. (the code could check if a table were empty, and fill it from the server's main/backup copy. The exit/backup routine could update the server table with any changes made during the session)

This is really easy to talk about, but implementing it has hidden hassles, i'm sure. :)