Question about synchronization and record locking

[Rocky Neurock]

I have the need to backup an access database hourly for my company and
in the interest of time I made a small application to copy the
database, append the hour to the filename and store it on a different
server. This backwards method locks the database every hour for about
a minute while it copies over. We can live with that but I'd rather
not.

I'd rather use replication, since we have four offices that use the
database anyway, so I would like to know if hourly synchronization
would cause the same type of locking. Has anyone used replication?
Can you tell me if synchronization causes any sort of locking issues?
Our offices only access data that pertains to that office and each user
only accesses data that pertains to them, so there should never be any
record locking conflicts.

The other alternative I thought of was to use a data reader to copy the
tables every hour so the database didn't get locked up. This method
would be speedy but it prevents me from copying queries, which is a
must. Any ideas here would be helpful too.

Thanks in advance.