I was told that every time you send coins and a change address is used, a new one is generated, so that there are always 100 addresses ready to be used. There is no mass generation. That also means that no matter when you make a backup, you have 100 sends left to make the next backup.
either way, I was under the impression that you only need one backup of your wallet and you're good.... as in for life, if your backup holds. But one could quickly go through a hundred transactions, and if one didn't periodically back up the wallet, one could lose the most recent transactions.
Anyway, maybe everyone knows this, but I didn't. My impression from reading stuff this past 2 months (I am green) was that one backup covered you