You could also change you code so that when it runs, it checks as early as possible if you have a file with a well known name (say ~/.freechat.run) and then switches to reading from it instead for the assets than can change.

You could have multiple updates my using say iso time and doing a sort (so that ~/.freechat.run.20231127120000 would be overriden by ~/.freechat.run.20231129160000 without making the user delete anything)