Support for custom Amazon S3 regions. You can now enter custom Amazon S3 region names when using the v4 signature method. This lets you do two things. First, you can use new regions added by Amazon before we can add a hardcoded region name in the interface. Second, you can use third party storage services which offer an Amazon S3 compatible API using v4 signatures (instead of v2 signatures).
Support for MySQL SSL/TLS connections for backed up sites. Joomla 4 allows you to use an explicit SSL/TLS connection to the MySQL server. This can work in two ways. On one hand, it can identify the server to the client using a Certification Authority (CA) certificate file. On the other hand it can replace the password to connect to the database server using a public and private certificate pair — much like SSH. Akeeba Backup and its restoration script support both methods in any combination (server-only identification, client-only identification and mutual identification). This is an extremely rare use case, most commonly encountered with database servers hosted on Microsoft Azure.
Add Show Inline Help support in component options for Joomla 4.1. This feature adds support for a new Joomla core feature coming in Joomla 4.1.3. The Options page is currently very busy with the long descriptions of every single option. Starting with Joomla 4.1.3 these descriptions will be hidden by default. A button labeled “Show Inline Help” will appear on the site's Toolbar. Clicking on it reveals the descriptions.
Bug fixes and minor improvements. Please take a look at the CHANGELOG below.
Akeeba Backup version 9 will only run on Joomla 4. If you still have a Joomla 3 site, don't worry! Akeeba Backup 8 will still be maintained and receive support from the release of Joomla 3.10 on August 17th, 2021 up to August 17th, 2023. Do note that Akeeba Backup 8 will no longer receive major new features. These will only be implemented on Akeeba Backup 9.
Also note that starting August 17th, 2021 we no longer support Akeeba Backup 8 on Joomla except for the use case of upgrading from Joomla 3 and with the sole intent of updating it to Akeeba Backup 9.
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.