[CentOS] Please help -- centos 5.8: does the slapcat still breaks ldap data integrity?

Hi all,

 I've a small project to backup and restore openldap servers online on centos 5.8. Basically I don't have the luxury to shutdown the ldap server, then backup whole /var/lib/ldap/, but have to backup online with slapcat or similar command line tool.

The major concern of using slapcat is the warning below, which was excerpt from link http://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/5.1/Deployment_Guide/s1-ldap-daemonsutils.html

 You must stop slapd by issuing the /sbin/service ldap stop command before using slapadd, slapcat or slapindex. Otherwise, the integrity of the LDAP directory is at risk.
Does the limitation of slapcat -- stop ldap first -- still exist? Please shed a light onto this. Thanks.

--Guolin