Precautions b4 compressing plannng cube?

Hi

we've a transactional cube that has around 25 requests with 20 month old data & each request averages around 20000 records. Interestingly, the cube was never compressed.

At this point, I feel, compressing the cube might improve performance.

I'd like to know any precautions that I need to know before hand.

I see one problem is, we'll be out of options to delete compressed requests on individual basis. Any other issues?

what is the best bet to back up this cube & its data incase to retrieve it back to original cube status?

Is there any check list to make sure nothing went wrong after compression for comparing pre-compresstion step & post-compression steps?

Appreciate your ideas / suggestions.