Nexus Repository Manager Upgrade to latest verison

Hi All,
I am upgrading our Production instance of Nexus to the latest version (2.14.15).I have the following command for taking backup of the db and data under sonatype-work directory .Please check on it and let me know when i should be running this ? Should i stop Current version(2.14.11) of nexus and take backup ? or i could take backup when the current version is running only ?

rsync -vaPzh /ci/sonatype/nexus/sonatype-work /ci/temp_backup

currently the sonatype-work is of 312GB data , so im planning on taking a manual backup to my local as well once …Please assist

Thanks,
Nagashree.B

Team,
Can we take backup of the sonatype-work directory when Nexus is running ?
Thanks,
Nagashree.b