Starting with Access 95, Jet (version 3.0) introduced a powerful
new technology: replication. Put simply, it allowed you to make
'special copies' of a database such that you could make changes
to each copy so that they would differ and then synchronize them
so that they would once again be the same. The founding
architectural principle is that replicas in the same replica set
should be thought of as being 'one synchronization away from
being identical.' At this point, you might want to object that
this was not completely true -- after all there are local
objects. And then starting with Access 97 came partial
replication. But neither of these things affect the basic
premise, they simply limit the scope of what will be identical.
Even the ability to do one-way synchronizations does not change
the premise -- because after a one-way synchronization you were
simply one half of a sync away from being identical! Underlying
all of this was an even simpler principle. You see, since every
replica is just one sync away