Jens Vestergaard shows how to take backups of Analysis Services cubes:
I have not met a setup where applying compression was not an option, yet. Obviously this has a penalty cost on CPU while executing the backup, and will affect the rest of the tasks running on the server (even if you have your data and backup dir on different drives). But in my experience, the impact is negligible.
This may not be the case with the encryption option, as this has a much larger foot print on the server. You should be using this with some caution in production. Test on smaller subsets of the data if in doubt.
Another thing to keep in mind, as always when dealing with encryption, do remember the password. There is no way of retrieving the data other than with the proper password.
My goal is to be able to rebuild any cube from the relational database, but even with that goal in mind, it is smart to have backups.