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Since you didn't include the mandatory information and the log file (which are necessary for me to understand the nature of the problem) I will proceed to an educated guess: around 78% of the process is where we're trying to update the #__ak_stats table with the details of the backup. That happens after taking a complete backup and right before we finalise the backup process. It is, however, possible that after an upgrade the table is not updated properly, causing an infinite loop. You experience that as a "backup freeze". The solution is to uninstall and reinstall Akeeba Backup.

More educated guesses (please tell me if I guess correctly): you have Joomla! 1.5 and are hosted on a mid-priced host using cPanel. Your account with the host was either created over 18 months ago, or the host is running an old version of cPanel. You had a version of Akeeba Backup around 3.3.10 or earlier before upgrading to Akeeba Backup 3.4.3. The problem started to occur right after the upgrade.

Dave,

A backup log file is created even if a backup doesn't complete. I mean, think about it. We would only ever need to take a look at a backup log file when the backup doesn't finish. If we created the log file only when the backup finishes we'd completely beat the purpose of having a log file. A log file is like a plane's flight data recorder ("black box"). It records everything which is going on. In the event of a crash we take a look at it so that we can understand what led to the crash. I hope that analogy helps you to better understand the function of log files.

Regarding the retrieval of the log file, it's easy. Well, it's much easier than retrieving a plane's flight data recorder :) The instructions can be found in this troubleshooting page:

If you have a backup issue, ZIP and attach the backup log file. You can download the log file by going to Components, Akeeba Backup, click on View Log, select the backup origin (that's "Back-end" unless you seek assistance for a remote, front-end or CRON backup) and, in the new page, click on Download Log. Take that text file, put it in a ZIP file and attach it to the forum.

In any case, based on your hosting environment description I am 99.9999% confident that your problem is that the table I mentioned wasn't updated when you upgraded Akeeba Backup. Please try uninstalling and reinstalling Akeeba Backup first, then take a new backup. If the backup fails, please download, ZIP and attach your log file with your next reply - but do tell me that you did the uninstall/reinstall thing.

You're welcome, Dave!