Support

Hello Peter,

you have to different issue.
First of all, the download id: please double check your Download ID on Akeeba Backup, change it if it's different from the stored one and then hit "Refresh update information".
The last step is very important, don't skip it.

Regarding your backup, there are several possible reasons:

1. Table with huge data. There are tables with more than 500k rows. Do you really need them? If not, please exclude their content from the backup
2. Directories with a lot of files. Please try to change the scanner engine to Large site scanner

I just saw that the backup took a lot before stopping, something like 40 minutes.
Can you remember if your computer went in "sleep" mode when you were taking the backup?

Usually those large big tables are storing statistical information (ie visits or something like that).
Most of the time you don't need them when you restore the site.

Receiving a blank page after installing the latest versions of Akeeba Backup, Admin Tools, Akeeba Ticket System, DocImport or Akeeba Release System using Live Update (the update button found inside each component's control panel page) is normal and does not indicate an error.

As described in the change logs of these components, the versions released since March 2014 no longer make use of Akeeba Live Update. Due to popular request all of our software is now making use of Joomla!'s own extensions update feature. In the future you will find the updates to our software in Extensions, Manage Extensions, Update. Joomla! itself will be responsible for discovering, downloading and installing the updates. Our extensions update code (Akeeba Live Update) has been removed from all of our components.

This is the reason you are receiving a blank page. Since you made an update using Live Update, after the update was complete it tried redirecting back to itself. However it was already removed in the updated version, hence the blank page. This is not an error. Your update has been installed just fine. You can verify it by logging back in to your site's administrator page and visiting the component's main page. You will see that our component functions just fine and is, in fact, upgraded to the latest release.

If for any reason the update did network, please consult our documentation which contains detailed instructions for alternative update methods. Cutting a long story short, installing the latest version on top of the old one but without uninstalling the old version will perform an update.

We apologies for the confusion caused by the blank page. Unfortunately it was a bit of a Catch-22 situation for us. If we included Live Update in those releases the same problem would occur in the next version that would not have live update, plus some other interesting update issues (Live Update would report an update available if you used Joomla!'s extensions updater and vice versa). Removing it causes a blank page. Not using Joomla!'s own updater caused distress to many users. Every solution was a bad one. We chose the one that will be the best in the long run.

You can't automatically exclude those files.
You can manually exclude them using the Files and Directories Exclusion