Also you don't need to open your savings wallet when you transfer BTC into it.  Just send the coins to one of the addresses you've generated for it.  Since the transaction is pushed into the block chain it is done, regardless of whether the client is active or not.  You could send hundreds of coins to your savings wallet and not check it for months.  Once you do open it, it will download the block chain, and all of the transactions will show up.

As others have said, make sure you have multiple copies of your saving wallet on several forms of media, and in several physically separated locations.  Maybe even put a TrueCrypt container file containing your savings.wallet.dat on Dropbox or some similar service.