Hi Matt,
I've seen many clients schedule case backups to run each week night. Schedule case backups to run as five separate tasks (M,Tu,W,Th,F) as set each to run "Weekly."
A backup schedule may run like this:
Monday Case Backup (run 23:00, Weekly)
Tuesday Case Backup (run 23:00, Weekly)
Wednesday Case Backup (run 23:00, Weekly)
Thursday Case Backup (run 23:00, Weekly)
Friday Case Backup (run 23:00, Weekly)
Since a case backup runs on each day of the week, you will always have at least one week's worth of backups.
I would set a general workflow to make sure that all of your reviewers are out of a case by a time in late evening - maybe 23:00 - when the backups begin - basically let them know when they are going to begin, and that in order to have full backup of their case work product, they will need to log off of their current case.
Of course, this is not always doable, depending on case deadlines, and other factors. When users are still logged in while a case is starting backup, the backups will fail - I'm sure you've experienced that before.
If you have active cases where you're actively reviewing processing/OCR/producing and you can't run a nightly backup I would consider backing up these cases on an alternating basis (so you say backup this active case M-W-F each week) or if you know that the case is going to be active 24x7 then set aside a weekend day (preferably Saturday) to schedule a full case backup on the Active case - it is not optimal but better than not having any case backups at all.
I would not recommend running case backups to output to the appliance D: drive under any circumstances, even if temporary. If the D: drive were to become inaccessible then all of the case backups would be lost. I highly recommend configuring the case backup directory to write to External storage, off Clearwell appliance.
As far as node backups are concerned, I highly recommend running one each week - it is a task that can be scheduled in Windows (The Clearwell System Admin Guide, it provides instructions on how to configure the appropriate network directory off appliance to write the backups to).
In the event of an appliance failure a current node backup provides a faster way to restore the appliance quickly to a working state. I recommend running the node backups on a Sunday, when there is usually no activity on the appliance - so set the Windows scheduled task to start at 03:00 in the morning and let it run. Oftentimes the node backup runs for hours, so at least on a Sunday you have a full day to let it complete.
I hope this helps!
Jon