bitcoin.org/en/secure-your-wallet says:
Backup your entire wallet
Some wallets use many hidden private keys internally. If you only have a backup of the private keys for your visible Bitcoin addresses, you might not be able to recover a great part of your funds with your backup.
Make regular backups
You need to backup your wallet on a regular basis to make sure that all recent Bitcoin change addresses and all new Bitcoin addresses you created are included in your backup. However, all applications will be soon using wallets that only need to be backed up once.
Are either of these a concern with the latest versions of Multibit or the QT clients for the main alts?
By the way, with the QT clients, if I've encrypted my wallet with a password and I "Backup Wallet", is the backed up wallet encrypted also?