How to recover an old wallet.dat file Back in 2011 when bitcoin started to make the news, I created a wallet and let it run for a bit (no pun intended). It almost fried my computer so I stopped. In the process, I think I remember I mined 0.05 BTC. Before deleting the app from my Mac, I've saved a file called wallet.dat somewhere.

Today out of curiosity I googled the conversion rate and saw that 0.05BTC are worth about 45 USD.

What can I do to recover that file? I've opened a Coinbase account but I don't see anything about importing files. I'm on Mac OS, if it matters...

EDIT: I've now installed Bitcoin-Qt. I've replaced the wallet.dat file. It says 

"wallet out of sync", balance = 0.05BT


It also says "synchronising network" but it's been 15 minutes and the progress bar barely seems to be at 1%.
Bitcoin-Qt is a full p2p network client, so to work, it needs to sync with the network. Basically, it will download every transaction that was done with the currency (~15 GB in total at the moment). Might take one or two days, then you'll be good to go.