by Natassia Stelmaszek.
"Any" action is a pretty broad term, backing up a course could be considered to be an action that is logged which in turn would trigger another backup leading to a perpetual loop.
My reasoning is that someone, at some time had to write some code that determines whether or not a course should be backed up. It might be a series of "if-then" or "case" statements that evaluates the administrators' settings under "General backup defaults" and "Automated backup setup" along with a course's attributes or perhaps it is in the form of a flag that can be set by various processes. It may be rooted in ancient Moodle code that no one has examined in years. I'm not a developer but I'm willing to try to dig up the answer if someone could give me a clue about where to start searching.
Something happened coincident with my update to Moodle 3.4 that suddenly caused the number of courses being backed up on my system to quadruple. Evaluating the criteria listed on the Moodle pages that are available to the administrator, says that it should not be happening. I'm just trying to figure out how to get it to go back to "normal".
Natassia