I heard that I cannot just copy my wallet.dat and that I have to specifically make a backup somehow, do you have any idea of the validity of that claim?

Let's say I just take my old wallet.dat without specifically making a backup (whatever that means) and throw it in Bitcoin core 0.12.19 and use the upgrade wallet option, will that risk my coins if the wallet cannot be read?

Hi, I have been out of the bitcoin loop for a while and recently booted up my old hard drive which had a few coins on it.  

My client is 0.3.19 and it is obviously not up to date on the current blockchain.  I expected it to start downloading blocks but it has 0 connections currently.

How can I access my coins?  Do I need to somehow get my old client to get up to date and then transfer the coins to a newer wallet, or can I throw my wallet.dat file into a newer version of the wallet program?

If the latter case is possible, then which client can I use?  I see the following on the about page: http://imgur.com/Dq9UpLv

I know there is something called bitcoin core, is that what I have?

Thank you for any help, it's greatly appreciated!


Edit: I was able to make a backup wallet by doing the following in 2 different command prompts:

bitcoin.exe -server -rpcpassword=temporary
bitcoin-cli.exe -rpcpassword=temporary backupwallet "backupwallet.dat"

I had to get bitcoin-cli.exe from version 12.0 and place it in the daemon folder because using bitcoind was giving me a dll error