Automatically handle unsupported database storage engines when restoring MySQL databases. This comes in handy when you are restoring a backup taken on MariaDB or Percona to a MySQL server or when transferring a site from a live server to a misconfigured local server which doesn't support InnoDB for example.
Help buttons everywhere. No more excuses for not reading the fine manual :) More seriously, we don't want you to feel lost and confused when using our software. That's why we've written extensive documentation. Now it's easier than ever using it, in the same way Joomla lets you get help for all of its own components.
Improved Amazon S3 support. We let you use Import from S3 with buckets hosted in even more locations, including Frankfurt and São Paolo, and we fixed a bug that prevented the uploads to newly created S3 buckets in some cases.
Improved WebDAV support. Now you can back up to paths containing spaces. It's still a bad idea using spaces in folder names but if you really, really want to you now can.
Some browsers auto-fill the WRONG password in the database restoration page leading to frustration and restoration failure. Google Chrome, we are looking at you! We added a workaround which addresses this issue with extreme prejudice. If you spot any other password autofills which make no sense (yellow background in the fields) please let us know.
The following highlights are from earlier 5.0.x releases.
Removed Dropbox API v1 integration.. If you are still using it please upgrade to our Dropbox API v2 integration immediately. Unfortunately, due to the way the two Dropbox API versions work it is impossible to have an automatic switch to the v2 API. Please read below for more information about the Dropbox switch.
Restoration: a warning is displayed if the database table name prefix contains uppercase characters. Keep in mind that MySQL does not work reliably with table names containing uppercase characters on servers with a case-insensitive filesystem such as all Windows and most macOS installations. The only RELIABLE way to transfer a site between these servers and a case-sensitive server (e.g. Linux, what most hosts out there use) is having all lowercase table names. Joomla and its extensions already do that. However, if you set up a database table name prefix in uppercase or mixed case letters you are triggering MySQL's limitations which will result in problems backing up and restoring your site. If that's the case with your site the restoration script will warn you. Conversely, we added some smart code during backup to look for the wrong case table names and try to back them up. It usually can do that unless you've got tables with the same name in all lowercase. In this case you've got a broken database and nobody can help you. You should have just read our documentation. We've warned you about this since 2007.
We have removed integration with the Dropbox v1 API because Dropbox itself announced it is deprecated and will be turned off by June 28th, 2017. We chose to remove support for the deprecated API now to make sure that all of our clients will be ready for Dropbox' deprecation next year. If you think that's an overkill please keep in mind that we added Dropbox v2 support in November 2015 with the documentation note that it's the recommended version and that the v1 API may stop working at any point.
Unfortunately, Dropbox' v1 and v2 APIs are very different and there is no way to have an automatic migration from v1 to v2. The access tokens used in the two API versions are and work different. This means that by upgrading to a new version of Akeeba Backup your backup profiles which were using the deprecated Dropbox v1 API integration are no longer linked to a post-processing engine and produce errors.
Luckily there's a very simple process you have to follow once on every site and backup profile you want to (re)link to Dropbox.
THIS PROCESS ONLY NEEDS TO TAKE PLACE ONCE PER BACKUP PROFILE AND SITE!
Unlike the Dropbox v1 API you must not copy the token from one profile / site to another. Instead, repeat the process above. Dropbox API v2 produces a new token every time you link a new backup profile or site to Dropbox without revoking the previous one.
Again, we apologize for having to go through this process but this is due to changes made on Dropbox' side. On the upside, the Dropbox API v2 is much more stable, allows for bigger uploads and lets us perform “chunk uploads”, a technique which allows us to transfer very large backup archives without you having to set up small part sizes. You can now safely use a Part Size for Split Archives up to 2047 Mb without any upload worries.
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.
Note: even though this version of our software will install and work on PHP 5.3.3 and later we WILL NOT provide support to anyone who is using PHP 5.3.
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.