Toucan-action stopped by Windows 8.1

I routinely backup about 2GB of data (compressed, uncompressed is about 4GB) using Toucan from my USB stick to the laprtop's HDD. There is sometimes a situation that looks like what you're describing, i.e. it looks like it has stopped - however it actually goes on. You can test this by using bare 7-zip and trying to zip the data from one of your HDDs to another one, just like you do with Toucan (make sure to pick the same file format and compression level for this to be apples-to-apples) - and you should see 7-zip just taking more time on some of the files, which in Toucan looks like a stall.

Plus there seems to be some potential glitch in Toucan itself, when it's not refreshing the interface in some situations (and moving the mouse in the window seems to help) - but I've never got to debugging this as the community interest level was too low and this doesn't bother me personally (I just start the backup and come back after a while). So just try to wait a little more and it should be ok. I'm using version 3.1.3 (the latest one I've released a year or so ago) - just to make sure we talk about the same one.

@alt:
Your second point is what I experience except when the interface stops, the disk activity also stops. If I leave it working it will keep starting and stopping and makes a 20 minute job last for many hours.