King's sword of Haste

[LennyLen]

battlenet.net mentions that after 3 months of non use the character becomes inactive or something. If I abandon this character for a year or two how would I reactive him at that time if I wished to?

After 3 months, you do not lose the character, but simply the battle.net account, which for Diablo 1, is just a username and associated password. If you do not play the character for 3 months, it will still be listed in the character list when you next connect (and incidentally, you can use the same multiplayer character on battle.net, LAN, modem and DCC games). Once you have selected the character you will need to re-activate the account by selecting 'New Account' instead of just entering the password. Note though, that anyone else may have started using the name in the meanwhile, so you may need to rename your character (this will not affect the character in any way).

What is involved in the saving process if the character is stored online.

There is no way of saving characters which are stored on the server (which luckily Diablo 1 characters are not). This is the whole idea behind having the Realms where characters are stored on the server, as if you could copy the character, you could hack the save file.

Maybe I could take the files and store them in a seperate folder for some future use.

It's always a good idea to make copies of your charcter files. If you only copy them to a new folder on your HD however, they still risk being lost if the HD dies, so you may want to consider making copies to floppy disks, CDs or webspace.

Do you think Blizzard has any future plans of closing the old diablo battlenet?

Who knows, but if they do, there are many people out there with battle.net server emulators.