Hi,

I would like to obtain some clarification on what are the technical best practices to safekeeping wallets. I apologize for my newbieness on this matter, but I am looking for some clear and concise advice on the following:

a. If I understand correctly, our unique wallet data is held in wallet.dat -- this is the most important file that uniquely represents our identifier on the bitcoin network.

This would be my hypothetical question.

Let's pretend that I downloaded a fresh Bitcoin client, extracted my address. Then immediately backed-up my wallet.dat on some type of offline storage for example. Then placed this offline storage in a vault

If I was to send myself payments to this address and in 5 years for example -- I would place wallet.dat back into another Bitcoin wallet, would it catch-up and find all the payments that were ever sent to that wallet?

Essentially, my proposed approach is to instantiate the Bitcoin Client once to have a wallet.dat generated and to obtain the associated address. Delete the wallet.dat for this not to be active on a computer connected to a network. Then store offline (hack-proof), and simply use the address to bank coins.  

Are there any technical risks to this approach? E.g. Major Code changes that would negate such storage methodology?

Thanks in advance.