And what about downloading it on my laptop for now and then moving it to the external disc drive?
You have to be sensitive if you are keeping the wallet files. I advise you to save also a copy of your wallet.dat or if its possible for you to keep a copy of your private key written stored on a piece of paper.
Yes, of course.
Keeping the wallet.dat did not came immediately to my mind, but for sure I will do it too!
There were incidents before that they've tried to back it up but it seems that the file they've saved was corrupted so be careful doing that. Good luck with it!
It should work because ive seen few projects that extracted their blockchain data into .ZIP file for people to download and place in the right directory using file managers before launching the wallet for the wallet to recognize the data successfully instead of syncing the whole data from scratch again,i tried this with worktips project and it works