This release fixes an issue with the Remote JSON API feature used by third party services such as Watchful.li and myJoomla.com as well as Akeeba Remote Control CLI and Akeeba UNiTE to take backups automatically. In these cases profile #1 would always be used, despite your preferences.
There has been an issue with backups failing on sites using FaLang on servers using PHP 7.0. FaLang is breaking a core Joomla! API, reporting the wrong database driver used to connect to your site's database. Namely, it always returns "mysql" which is the ancient, obsolete database driver that's been removed from PHP 7.0 onwards. The actual driver used by Joomla! is "mysqli" (the trailing "i" stands for "improved"). Now Akeeba Backup detects the fake reply coming from FaLang and uses the "mysqli" driver instead.
We apologize for having to release five versions in a little over a week. Akeeba Backup 5 was a complete rewrite of our software. No matter the amount of testing, when something is rewritten you tend to bump to unexpected issues (like half of the hosts out there lacking a feature that was added in PHP ten years ago) or miss a few use cases. We are now trying to extend our testing beyond the backup engine, right into integration testing, to avoid such issues in the future. Of course this doesn't mean that bugs will henceforth be absent. Tests are only as good as the cases they cover. As software giants like Apple, Microsoft and Google can painfully tell you, there's always a case nobody thought of until it broke stuff in production. Such is the joy of making mass distributed software.
We only support Joomla! 3.4 or later, including 3.5. We strongly advise you to run Joomla! 3.4.7 or later for security reasons. Older versions of Joomla! have known major security issues which are being actively exploited to hack sites. Do note that these security issues were fixed on Christmas Eve 2015 thanks to the effort of our development team who contributed their time and knowledge to make Joomla! more secure.
Support for PHP 5.3 is discontinued. It's end of life since August 2014 and widely considered a security risk, unfit for production sites. Our software requries PHP 5.4 or later and is compatible with PHP 5.4, 5.5, 5.6 and 7.0. We strongly recommend using PHP 5.6 or 7.0.
We'd like to remind you that Joomla! 3.4 does NOT support PHP 7. PHP 7 is only supported by Joomla! 3.5.0 and later versions. Akeeba Backup will work perfectly fine (and very fast!) on a Joomla! 3.5 or later site running on PHP 7.0.