I'm not that tech illiterate, I just want to be careful...I have enough coins that I would like to be over cautious...
You should always maintain a backup of both your wallet.dat and your private keys. Instructions are here.
This way, you can just download and run new updates without worrying.
In addition, whenever you make a payment you should use coin control to specify an address for change to be sent to. Otherwise a change address will be created and you'll then have to back it up too.