rsync suddenly hanging indefinitely during transfers

Question

For the past few years, I have been using an rsync one-liner to back up important folders on my Mac Mini desktop (OSX 10.9, 2.5 GHz i5, 4 GB RAM) to a FreeNAS box (0.7.2 Sabanda

Answer 1

I was having the same problem and it was because I was running out of memory during the rsync. Created a swap file and problem solved.