Wanted: Easy instructions to put your bitcoin wallet onto a flash drive

[joae1975]

Retro, I know

But do you have to have the whole blockchain downloaded to back up your wallet?
I sent coins to my computer but the wallet was out of date, it's reindexing right now.  The coins aren't there yet.  If I back it up, then put it on a thumb drive, will it see the new coins I sent?  I'm assuming yes.

[Dabs]

If you are talking about bitcoin-qt, the wallet.dat contains your addresses as well as all your transactions. If you are not synchronized, you won't see recent transactions. You may want to fully sync, then do a manual rescan. The client will look back all the way from the first block to the present and grab all those transactions related to your wallet.

rescans can take awhile, 10 to 20 minutes as of today, so do something while waiting.

in the meantime, you can do a quick check on block explorer or blockchain.info for your specific addresses.