When I do an all-day work session in Lightroom, I like to back up every few hours, just be sure that I don't lose a full day's work, if there is catalog corruption or a huge mistake. Right now I need to exit Lightroom and then restart it, which can be a real time-waster.
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If it is "How do I Backup the LrC catalog without closing the program" the answer is extremely simple.
Manually COPY the LrC Catalog, just the CatalogName.lrcat file, to some other drive on your system using the File Manager program that is included with the operating system. Finder on Mac and File Explorer on Windows.
That would probably not be a good idea. If you make a copy of the catalog while Lightroom is running, then you'll copy an open database file rather than a correctly closed one. There is a good chance that you won't be able to use this copy as backup if and when the time comes that you need to replace your catalog by a backup.
I would suggest it if I hadn't done this and been doing this for a few years now. To test when I have the time I open those backups and I do do the normal backups once a day.
Then something must have changed. There were issues with Apple Time Machine backups for exactly that reason. Maybe that was because Time Machine could backup a catalog at the very moment Lightroom was writing to it.
Well, one would not, should not, start a backup, a manual backup, then before the backup is finished, go and touch LrC, that would be asking for it. Stop what you are doing, create the backup (copy) wait until it is done, then go back to editing.
Even though I takes more time, I would quit and restart Lightroom (and let Lightroom make the backup on quit). The advantage of letting Lightroom do it is that is verifies the catalog before backing up, so you are absolutely certain. If you are in a hurry, you could uncheck the option to optimize in the backup dialog. You do not need to optimize each day, let alone after each backup if you backup several times a day.
Maybe of interest: using the LRRelaunch script- My 60,000 image catalog takes me 3 mouse clicks, 25 seconds to backup, and about 10 seconds restarting automatically.
~30 seconds is not a lot of time to spend ensuring that regular backups are created.
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