Features marked with "PRO" are available in the Professional release only.
Joomla! 1.5 and 1.6 native. When Joomla! 1.6 RC1 came out, it broke (again!) the installation process for Akeeba Backup. Once more, we have updated our component to install and operate smoothly on the upcoming Joomla! 1.6 system. Moreover, Akeeba Backup supports sites wich have moved their libraries directory off the web root. In this case, the library files will be included in the archive, but you will have to move them to their final off-site location after restoring the backup. Please note that Joomla! 1.6 is not ready for production use yet. You should only use it on private testing sites.
Improved look an feel. Many people complained that the interface looked as if it came from another CMS. As a result, we have redesigned Akeeba Backup's interface to blend in with your Joomla! administrator template. The tabular views of the filters became more intuitive. Search and filtering was added to the Administer Backup Files page. Finally, we added an approximative progress bar to the backup page. Since it's impossible to predict how long the backup will take, the progress bar may jump back and forth a bit during file backup. This is not a bug, it is the expected behaviour.
PRO Amazon S3 multi-part uploads. Amazon recently announced that it is possible to transfer huge files in small chunks to their servers. Akeeba Backup 3.2.b1 introduces support for this feature, allowing single part backup archives and archive parts of up to 2Gb to be transferred to Amazon S3 without a risk of timing out.
PRO Settings encryption. On popular demand, all configuration settings are now encrypted using the industry standard AES-128 encryption scheme. This means that you can safely store sensitive information such as passwords in your Akeeba Backup Configuration settings. Note: You must have the mcrypt PHP extension installed. You can also disable encryption from the Component Configuration page if you wish.
PRO FTP Directory Explorer in practically every page requiring you to fill in FTP settings. This allows you to easily figure out the FTP directory setting without having to fire up an external FTP application.
PRO Remote (cloud storage) files management. Up till now you could store your backup off the server, i.e. in Amazon S3 or a remote FTP server. The downside is that the backup wasn't available any more on your server for immediate restoration. Akeeba Backup 3.2.b1 introduces the ability to fetch remotely stored files back to your own server. Moreover, it can delete remotely stored files or directly download them from the remote storage to your local PC. Only files stored on Amazon S3 and remote FTP servers are currently supported.
PRO Quotas for remote (cloud storage) files. The count and size quotas can now be applied to remotely stored files too. This allows you to force Akeeba Backup to maintain a preset maximum number of archives to the remote storage locations. Currently, only files stored on Amazon S3 and remote FTP servers are supported.
PRO Archive Discovery and Import. On popular demand, you can upload any ZIP, JPA or JPS file anywhere in your site and have Akeeba Backup import it in the "Administer Backup Files" page. Note: for security reasons, this feature won't work if you upload the archive in your site's root.
This is a brief list of changes between Akeeba Backup 3.2.b1 and the previous 3.1.5 release:
New features
+ Amazon S3 multi-part uploads
+ Settings are stored encrypted with AES-128 (Professional release) using a site-specific key for maximum security
+ FTP Directory Explorer for the DirectFTP archiver engine and the "Upload to FTP" post-processing engine
+ FTP Directory Explorer for the integrated restoration page
+ The component-wide Parameters button is displayed in the Configuration page as well
+ Date conditional filter
+ Progress meter in the backup page. It's a little jumpy in the file packing stage, but it's better than nothing!
+ Backup sizes are now cached in the database
+ Akeeba Backup now records where it has transferred the backup archives to
+ Download backup sets from remote storage locations (FTP, S3, ...) back to the server
+ Delete backup sets stored in remote storage locations
+ Download backup sets from remote storage locations directly to your PC
+ You can now insert any kind of filters in the tabular view of Files and Directories exclusions
+ You can now insert any kind of filters in the tabular view of Database Tables exclusions
+ Added search and filtering to the Administer Backup Files page
+ Archive discovery and import
+ If you put your Joomla! libraries in an off-site directory, Akeeba Backup will detect that and include them automatically in the backup set
+ Use of secure Download ID instead of username and password for live updates of the Professional release
+ The component configuration button is now in the cPanel to make it more obvious to new users
+ Quotas can now be applied to remotely stored files. S3 and FTP supported for now.
Updated features
~ The DropBox engine will attempt to upload the file again in case of a soft error (e.g. network connection issue) to reduce the chance of failing the upload e.g. when the host delays the SSL initialization
~ Localization of the warnings printed when jQuery is not loaded or the media/com_akeeba folder has wrong permissions
~ Simplified the interface to follow Joomla! styling standards more closely
~ Removed "Download" button from Administer Backup Files page as it doesn't make sense in multipart archives. Use the download links on the right of each backup row instead.
~ Made clear in the integrated Restoration page that you can restore directly to remote servers
Bug fixes
# The Lazy Plugin would not save the backup record properly due to a race condition (different user triggering the backup and triggering the first backup step)