I just experienced the Maemo backup application to hang when I tried to do a backup. I found out that the culprit of failure was the backup configuration file for pidgin, /etc/osso-backup/applications/pidgin.conf. It tries to backup the directory /home/user/.purple, and osso-backup seems to have big trouble with long filenames containing all kinds of special characters like @ and # which there are plenty of in the logs subdirectory where the chat logs reside.

If you happen to have the same problem, I have posted a workaround on this blog.

This is probably a bug in osso-backup (bora), but I didn't have the time to report it yet.