wravoc Re: your script: a thought occured to me a few weeks ago, which I forgot until you bumped this thread up.
You can get rid of this manual editing, right?:
[SCRIPT]
first_run = True
Since the script needs to run as root, and the files you're copying are all pretty small, you can create dirs. inside, say, /var/db/<script-name> based on, let's say, date +%s (+ a pristine directory for the first-run backup). This way, one can make multiple changes, and then roll-back to any of the previous versions. Do a diff even. etc...