not necessarily but advised ... use the in-app feature for backups and remember your passphrase ... just in case ..
You should not need it
Thank you very much for your help Xeroc, it seems fine now and the new version is much nicer, although it did scare me when during installation when it starting giving me notifications of trades taking place, but apparently it was just reliving past glories.
An additional comment to devs - you if you want people outside the small circle of old time users here to actually use Bitshares X you have to take them into consideration a little. How was I supposed to know there was an important mandatory update? I only just updated the wallet a few days ago, I can't even see a forum post about it here now when I look - it seems like you have to be part of some secret inner circle on the right IRC chats or whatever it is to be able to use this thing without problems, which isn't good for encouraging more people to use it. I'm sure it wouldn't be difficult to add a little notifcation into the wallet itself for things like this, as NXT does.
Thankfully I had already closed all my positions and made some nice profits from buying BitUSD when the price was stupidly cheap and then selling them, but if you want traders to use this software you have to understand that 'little problems' like this can potentially cost people a lot of money and really put them off.