Restoration: ANGIE now applies very high memory and execution time limits to prevent some timeout / memory outage issues on most hosts. ANGIE will now try to set a maximum memory usage of 1Gb and a PHP execution time limit of one day — much more than it will possibly need. This allows it to work even on slow hosts with unreasonably low default memory and execution time limits, especially during long running operations such as restoring your database. Note that the backup engine typically uses 12 to 16Mb and PHP does NOT reserve the entire memory limit; this is a limit to how much memory can be reserved as needed at a maximum, therefore this option is safe to use even on hosts with much less available system memory e.g. 512Mb or even lower. Likewise, the high timeout limit doesn't mean that ANGIE will run for an entire day or that even trying to do so would necessarily succeed. It's just a limit, i.e. the longest it could possibly run before PHP itself terminates the process.
Restoration: ANGIE now warns you if you leave the database connection information empty. When restoring your site on a different server, domain, subdomain or subdirectory than where you backed up from the default behaviour is to see the database connection information fields empty. This is a good hint that you need to provide connection details to a new database. A stark minority of users left that empty, clicked on the Next button and was promptly perplexed as to why they got an error that they cannot connect to the database. There's a new message in this case notifying the user that they are leaving these fields empty, asking them to confirm this is what they really intended to do. Beyond that there's nothing more we can do to point out the obvious...
Option to set a really large PHP memory limit during backup. Enabling this new option will have the backup engine attempt to set the PHP memory limit to 1Gb. This will allow you to process much larger files on most hosts with very conservative memory limit settings. Note that the backup engine typically uses 12 to 16Mb and PHP does NOT reserve the entire memory limit; this is a limit to how much memory can be reserved as needed at a maximum, therefore this option is safe to use even on hosts with much less available system memory e.g. 512Mb or even lower.
More helpful and forceful installation abortion message when you try to install this package on Joomla 4.1 or later. This software is made for installation and use on Joomla 3 only. It is safe to leave it installed when migrating to Joomla 4 but only because you need to preserve the data for migration to Akeeba Backup 9 or later. You are not meant to install this package on Joomla 4 itself. If you try to do that you will get an error message reminding you to install Akeeba Backup 9 instead.
Bug fixes and minor improvements. Please take a look at the CHANGELOG below.
Do not use Akeeba Backup 8 to take backups of Joomla 4 sites. Akeeba Backup 8 is minimally compatible with Joomla 4, as in: it won't break your site when you upgrade from Joomla 3.10 to Joomla 4. The minimal compatibility is there only for the purpose of facilitating the upgrade process from 3.10 to 4.x. You cannot even install Akeeba Backup 8 on Joomla 4.1 and later — this is deliberate, there's no need for you to do that. Once you install Joomla 4 you MUST install Akeeba Backup 9 and complete the migration process to it, then uninstall Akeeba Backup 8 per the messages which will be displayed on Akeeba Backup's Control Panel page. Please note that we do not provide any support for taking or restoring backups of Joomla 4 sites with Akeeba Backup 8 after February 17th, 2022.
Please consult our Compatibility page. It explains our version support policy and lists which versions of our software are compatible with which versions of Joomla and PHP.