exactly, if you are dealing with under 100 BTC then a webwallet will work sufficiently well for keeping your money in, however those with larger balances are mo

exactly, if you are dealing with under 100 BTC then a webwallet will work sufficiently well for keeping your money in, however those with larger balances are more likely to not mind needing to download the entrie blockchain. I will say that I recently wiped by HDD and re-installed everything incuding the bitcoin-qt client and it probably took me around 24 hours to download the entire blockchain, probably just shy of 210000 blocks. The first 50-70% of data took very little time at all, the last 50-30% took the lions share of the 24 hours.