This would happen if you have symlinks in your site and have enabled the Dereference Symlinks options, causing a loop.
For example, if your site is hosted in /home/user/public_html and you have a symlink /home/user/public_html/foo/bar pointing to ../foo or /home/user/public_html and you're dereferencing symlinks you are creating an infinite loop. /home/user/public_html/foo/bar is now being seen as a real directory which contains the symlink bar (full path /home/user/public_html/foo/bar/bar). Since this points back to the foo directory, it's seen as a real directory which contains the symlink bar (full path /home/user/public_html/foo/bar/bar) which points to path /home/user/public_html/foo. This looping reference will grow infinitely, your backup will never end and your log file will be gigantic.
Another reason would be an exorbitantly large file, in the order of several tens of Gigabytes, which requires thousands upon thousand of steps to back up — by default, large files are read in chunks of 1MB.
Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos
Lead Developer and Director
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