Not sure if you fixed this, but as an alternative, could the information be stored in linked files (like Word docs) which are in a location on your system/network that users cannot delete from?

Your file would then hold a pointer to the filename and act accordingly. This would improve things from your users point of view because the documents could become properly formatted, rather than vanilla text.

My other thought is that you could use a copy of SQL Server, although there are issues with using the "text" data type there as well.

Regards
Simon