This is the directory where the result of the backup process goes. The result of the backup - depending on other configuration options - might be one or more archive or SQL files. This is also where your backup log file will be stored. The output directory must be accessible and directly writable by PHP.

Providing a directory with adequate permissions might not be enough! There are other PHP security mechanisms which might prevent using a directory, for example the open_basedir restriction which only allows certain paths to be used for writing files from within PHP. Akeeba Backup will try to detect and report such anomalies in the Control Panel page before you attempt a backup.

The output directory, all of its subdirectories and all files contained therein are automatically excluded from the backup. Do not use a folder that contains files you want to back up as your backup output directory. Most importantly, do not use your site's root as your output directory! This will lead to a backup that does not have any of your site's files, making it useless! Akeeba Backup will attempt to warn you in this case.

You can use the following variables to make your setting both human readable and portable across different servers - or even different platforms:

You can always click on the Browse... button to open a directory picker interface. Inside that interface and next to the folder's location there is the button labeled Use. Click on it to make the current directory the selected one and close the pop-up. To make it even easier for you, Akeeba Backup displays a small icon next to the Use button. If it's a green check mark the directory is writable and you can use it. If it's a red X sign, the directory is not readable and you either have to select a different directory, or change this directory's permissions.

When you save the Configuration page Akeeba Backup will automatically try to convert the Output Directory to use the three variables explained above. This is intentional. By using variables, your backup profile definition becomes portable across different servers and hosting accounts. Therefore if you restore your backup on a development site hosting account on the same server and take a backup on the restored site its files will be placed in the restored, development site's folder, not your original site's folder.

This option determines the verbosity of Akeeba Backup's log file:

We recommend using Errors and Warnings after you have confirmed that your backup is running properly and All Information And Debug when you need to request support.

Here you can define the name of your backup files. You must not enter an extension, it's added automatically.

There are a few available variables. Variables are special pieces of text which will be expanded to something else at backup time. They can be used to make the names of the files harder to guess for potential attackers, as well as allow you to store multiple backup archives on the output directory at any given time. The available variables and their expansion at backup time are:

The date and time options are expressed in the timezone selected in the component's Options page under Backup Timezone. By default this is GMT. You are advised to change this to the timezone your site administrators are most familiar with.

It defines the kind of backup you'd like to take. The backup types for Akeeba Backup are:

Akeeba Backup splits the backup process into smaller chunks, called backup steps, to prevent backup failure due to server time-out or server protection reasons. Each backup step has a minimum and maximum duration defined by the Minimum Execution Time, Maximum Execution Time and Execution Time Bias parameters in this Configuration page. If the step takes less time to complete than the minimum duration Akeeba Backup will have to wait.

When this box is unchecked (default) Akeeba Backup will have the server wait until the minimum execution time is reached. This may cause some very restrictive servers to kill your backup. Checking this box will implement the waiting period on the browser, working around this limitation.

	Important
	This option only applies to back-end backups. Front-end, JSON API (remote) and Command-Line (CLI) backups always implement the wait at the server side.

This option controls how Akeeba Backup will access your database and produce a dump of its contents to an SQL file. It is used with all backup types, except the files only type. The available options for this setting are discussed in the Database dump engines section of this document.

This option controls how Akeeba Backup will scan your site for files and directories to back up. The available options for this setting are discussed in the File and directories scanner engines section of this document.

This option controls which kind of archive will be produced by Akeeba Backup. The available options for this setting are discussed in the Archiver engines section of this document.

Akeeba Backup allows you to post-process the backup archives once the backup process is over. Post-processing generally means sending them somewhere off-server. This can be used, for example, to move your backup archives to cloud storage, increasing your data safety. The available options for this setting are discussed in the Data processing engines section of this document.

By selecting this option you instruct Akeeba Backup to also upload kickstart.php on the remote storage alongside your backup archive. When used with the Upload to Remote FTP Server and Upload to Remote SFTP Server you can perform easy site transfers without leaving your browser. Enter the new site's (S)FTP information in the Data Processing Engine configuration and select the Upload Kickstart to Remote Storage option, then take a new backup. When the backup is complete just open the new site's kickstart.php URL (e.g. http://www.example.com/kickstart.php) in your browser to begin the restoration on the new site's server. This even works with mobile devices, allowing you to transfer sites without using a laptop or desktop computer and without using up a lot of bandwidth on your device.

Akeeba Backup will include a restoration script inside the backup archive in order to make restoration easy and the backup archive self-contained. You do not need anything else except the archive in order to restore a site. Restoration scripts honour the settings in your configuration.php, modifying only those necessary (for example, the database connection information), allowing you to create pristine copies ("clones") of your site to any host. You can find more information about restoration scripts in the next Chapter.

If you are using the ANGIE embedded installer script you can optionally password-protect it, preventing unauthorised access to the installer. When you run the installer you will be asked to enter this password. Please note that the password is case sensitive, i.e. ABC, abc and Abc are three different passwords.

Using the off-site directories inclusion of Akeeba Backup Professional, the component will be instructed to look for files in arbitrary locations, even if they are outside the site's root (hence the name of that feature). All the directories included with this feature will be placed in the archive as subdirectories of another folder, in order to avoid directory name clashes. We call this folder the "virtual directory", because it doesn't physically exist on the server, it only exists inside the backup archive.

When not checked (default), Akeeba Backup will back up the files and folders under the root of the site it is installed. When this option is checked, it will use the site root in the Force Site Root option below. Use this when you want to backup a different site than the one Akeeba Backup is installed in.

The root of the site to back up. This is only necessary if you have checked the Site root override option above.

When not checked (default), Akeeba Backup will back up the database tables inside the database to which the site Akeeba Backup is installed in connects to. In other words, when this option is not checked, Akeeba Backup will back up the current site's database.

On the other hand, if this option is checked, Akeeba Backup will backup the database whose connection information you specify in the settings below. Use this when you want to backup a different site than the one Akeeba Backup is installed in.

Choose between the database driver.

For MySQL databases you can choose between the MySQL and MySQLi driver. If you do not know the difference between the two, MySQLi (with the trailing "i" which stands for "improved") is the best choice.

The hostname or IP address of the database server. Usually that's localhost or 127.0.0.1. If unsure, ask your host.

If your database server uses a non-standard port, enter it here. If you have no idea what this means, you most likely need to leave that field blank.

The username to connect to your site's database.

The password to connect to your site's database.

The nae of your database.

The prefix of the tables of the site you're backing up. That's the common part of their names up to and including the first underscore.

Tick the checkbox to activate this filter. It allows you to backup only files modified after a specific date and time. This is different than the incremental file only backup. It allows you to backup files newer than the specified date no matter which backup mode (full site backup, files only backup, incremental files only backup) you are using.

Files before this date and time will be skipped from the backup set. The format for the date and time parameter is YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS TIMEZONE. This means that you have to specify the year as four digits, followed by a dash, then the month as two digits (e.g. 09 for September), followed by a dash, then the day as two digits (e.g. 01 for the 1st day of the month). For example, September 1st, 2010 is written as 2010-09-01. If you want to specify the time, leave a space after the date and write down the time as the hour using two digits (00-23, no a.m./p.m. is supported!), then a semicolon, then the minutes as two digits, followed by a semicolon, then the seconds as two digits. For example 59 seconds after 11:05 p.m. is written as 23:05:59. You can optionally leave a space after the time and specify the timezone as GMT+/-time. For example, GMT-6 is Dallas time which is six hours behind the GMT and GMT+2 is two hours ahead of GMT which is the Eastern Europe Time. If you do not specify a timezone the GMT timezone is assumed.

	Important
	You have to set your server's timezone in Joomla!'s Global Configuration for this feature to work reliably. If you get strange results, try editing your site's Global Configuration before asking us for support.

Automatically exclude error log files, e.g. error_log, no matter where they are on the site being backed up. These files change their size while the backup is in progress which may lead to corrupt backups.

Please note that your host may be using a different naming convention for error logs, e.g. fatal.log instead of error_log. You will need to exclude these files yourself. This filter won't work on them.

When enabled, Akeeba Backup will automatically exclude the most common host-specific folders for storing access statistics for your site. These folders are read-only by your web site user, causing restoration issues if they are backed up

Skips over the contents of the Joomla! User Actions Log. The database table holding these records can get quite big on a busy site, slowing your backup down and bloating its size. Skipping over this data does not have an adverse impact to the functionality of the site.

Since Joomla! 2.5, the Joomla! CMS ships with a feature called "Smart Search", also known as "Finder". This is a mini search engine built into the CMS. It works by scanning your content and keeping a complex database structure linking potential search terms (words) with content items in compatible components. Due to its nature it stores an immense amount of information in the database. This information takes a very long time to back up. Moreover, this information doesn't need to be backed up as it can be regenerated by using the "Reindex" button in Smart Search's back-end interface. In the interest of speeding up your backups and not including redundant information in the backup Akeeba Backup by default has this option enabled. This instructs the database backup portion of our backup engine to skip backing up the contents of Finder's (Smart Search's) tables. If for some reason you want to back up this content please uncheck this box.

When enabled the backup which is in progress participates in the remote quotas. Please note that the backup currently in progress always participates in quotas calculated for files stored locally, on the web server the backup is being taken on.

Warning

Enabling this option may lead to a situation where you are left with no valid backup archives to restore your site from. We VERY STRONGLY recommend that you DISABLE this option. A backup archive may consist of more than one part files, e.g. files with the same name but extensions such as .j01, .j02, …, .jpa for the JPA format (or the equivalent for JPS and ZIP format). It is possible that only some, but not all, of these files are uploaded to the remote storage. For example, you may have ran out of available space on the remote storage, or a temporary network issue prevented further uploads from taking place. This is NOT considered an error; some of the files are in remote storage and some are in local storage. Normally, you would have to rectify the issue, then go to the Manage Backups page and click on the “Transfer to Remote Storage Name” button to complete the transfer. However, let's say that you have enabled the Remote Quotas option and set up quota settings such that would result in all backup archive files previously uploaded to the remote storage being deleted. In this case your remote storage does NOT hold a complete, valid backup you can restore your site from. If at this point something catastrophic were to happen to your site, before you could go to the Manage Backups page to complete the transfer of the partially uploaded backup archive, and completely lost access to the not yet uploaded backup archive parts still sitting on your web server you will find yourself in the dire position of having a non-functional site and no backup to restore the site from.

Please note that disabling this option will result in at least two (2) backups taken with this backup profile being present in your remote storage: the backup you last took (which did NOT participate in remote quota management) and the backup or backups which have not been deleted yet by the remote quota management.

If you have disabled this option and either set Count Quota to 1 or set Size Quota to something that is less than twice the size of a full backup taken with this backup profile you will see that there are two (2) backups stored remotely instead of only one. This is normal and expected. In fact, there is no way to only have one backup stored remotely except enabling this option. This is another way of telling you that only keeping the last backup in remote storage is dangerous and can indeed lead to a situation where you are left without a backup.

Please weigh the pros and cons of this option very carefully. We advise you to always err on the side of caution, storing several backups of your site in remote storage, ideally with some kind of planned redundancy. Paying a few cents or dollars more every month to ensure that you can recover your site if something goes awry with your server is far less expensive in the long run than risking your site being completely gone and unrecoverable in an unlikely —but not impossible!— cascade of events. Taking backups is risk mitigation which is itself an integral part of risk management. Risk management is not about what happens when everything goes according to plan; it's about surviving the worst case scenario, the unknown, when nothing goes according to plan.

When checked, Akeeba Backup will only apply quotas based on the date and time the backup was started. This allows you to easily do something like "keep daily backups for the last 15 days and always keep the backup taken on the first of each month".

	Warning
	Enabling this options makes Akeeba Backup completely ignore the size and count quotas.

Only applies when the Enable maximum backup age quotas option is enabled.

Backups older than this number of days will be deleted. Newer backups will not be deleted.

Only applies when the Enable maximum backup age quotas option is enabled.

Even when a backup is older than the Maximum back age, in days setting, it won't be deleted if it was taken on this day of the month. For example, if you set this to 1, backups taken on the first day of each calendar month will not be deleted. Setting this option to 1, the backup age to 31 and enabling the maximum backup age quotas you end up keeping all backups taken the last month and keeping the backups taken on the first of each month.

When the locally stored files of a backup record are deleted (either manually or automatically after uploading it to a remote storage) the record is marked as Obsolete or Remote. Some users prefer to limit the number of the backup entries showing in the Manage Backups (formerly "Administer Backup Files") page. This option instructs Akeeba Backup to keep at most that many obsolete/remote records and automatically delete older obsolete/remote entries. This is different than the rest of the quotas because it doesn't remove files from your server, it removes the backup entry from Akeeba Backup's interface.

Warning

Backups marked as "Remote" are also considered obsolete records: the backup archive does not exist on your server, it only exists on the remote storage. Therefore this setting will also remove the backup records for the Remote backups. Since you are removing the backup records they WILL NOT participate in remote file quotas! Therefore the Obsolete records to keep setting MUST be higher than the total number of backups you will keep before the quotas kick in plus one. For example, if you are taking 4 backups a day and you have enabled a maximum backup age quota of 30 days you need to set the Obsolete records to keep to at least 121 (4 backups / day x 30 days + 1 = 120 + 1 = 121). Otherwise the maximum backup age quotas will NOT work as expected.

	Important
	A quota value of zero means "Keep all obsolete records" rather than "delete all obsolete records". To make it abundantly clear: if you set the "Obsolete records to keep" setting to 0 then Akeeba Backup will NOT remove ANY obsolete records EVER.

When checked, old backup archives will be erased when the total size of archives stored under this (and only this) profile exceed the Size quota setting.

Defines the maximum aggregated size of backup archives under the current profile to keep. Only has an effect if the previous options is activated.

When checked, old backup archives will be erased when there are more backups stored under this (and only this) profile exceed the Count quota setting.

Defines the maximum number of backups under the current profile to keep. Only has an effect if the previous options is activated.

Some servers deploy anti-hacker measures (such as mod_evasive or mod_security) which will deny connections to the server if the same URL is accessed multiple times in a limited amount of time. Akeeba Backup has to call its backup URL multiple times, so it runs the risk of being treated as a potential hacker and denied connection to your server, resulting to backup failure.

In order to work around this issue, Akeeba Backup can throttle the rate of server requests using this setting. A minimum execution time of 2 seconds means that calls to the backup URL will happen at most once every two seconds. You are suggested to keep the default value.

Akeeba Backup has to divide the backup process in individual small steps in order to avoid server timeouts. However, it has to know how small they have to be; that's why this setting exists. Akeeba Backup will try to avoid consuming more time per step than this setting. You have to use a number lower than the maximum_execution_time setting in your host's php.ini file. In fact, we suggest using 50% of that value here: if your host allows up to 30 seconds in the php.ini, you have to enter no more than 15-17 seconds here. If unsure, 7 seconds is a very safe value under most configurations.

When Akeeba Backup calculates the available time left for performing operations within the current backup step a number of external settings may skew this result and lead to timeout errors. This setting defines how conservative the backup engine will be when performing those calculations and is expressed as a percentage of the Maximum execution time parameter. The less this setting is, the more conservative Akeeba Backup gets. It is suggested not to use a value over 75%, unless you have a very fast server. If you experience timeouts, you may want to lower this setting to a value around 50%.

When this option is unchecked Akeeba Backup will completely stop the backup when the server responds with an error or the communication with the server is cut short. When this option is enabled (default), Akeeba Backup will try to resume the backup by repeating the last backup step. This will not let you successfully resume all backups which result in an error: only backup attempts temporarily blocked by server CPU usage restrictions or network outage issues can be resumed. If the backup fails due to a timeout error, memory outage, incompatible server software etc the backup resumption will result in the same error until it leads to a permanent backup failure.

	Important
	This feature only applies to back-end backups. This feature will not be taken into account when you have enabled the Process each part immediately option in the configuration of the Data processing engine since it's impossible to retry backing up to a backup archive which may have already been transferred to remote storage and removed from the server.

How many seconds to wait before resuming the backup. It is advisable to set this to 30 seconds or more (120 seconds is recommended in most cases) to give your server / network the necessary time to recover from the error condition which caused your backup to fail.

How many consecutive times should we retry resuming the backup before finally giving up and throwing a permanent error (backup failure). 3 to 5 retries work best on most servers.

When the application detects a large file (see the filesystem scanner engine configuration) it will try to break the execution of the current backup step and start backing up the large file in its own backup step. This is a conservative behaviour that increases the likelihood of being able to backup large files but makes the backup slower. If you check this box the backup will become faster, but it might fail backing up larger files.

When the application finishes backing up a large file (see the filesystem scanner engine configuration) it will try to break the execution of the current backup step and continue the backup process in a step. This is a conservative behaviour that decreases the likelihood of the backup engine timing out after backing up a large file but makes the backup slower. If you check this box the backup will become faster, but it might fail after backing up larger files.

The application tries to guess how much time it will take it to backup each file. If it believes that backing up the next file in its queue will take too long it will break the backup step and continue the backup in a new step. This decreases the likelihood of server timeouts, at the expense of making the backup a little slower, especially if you have lots of tiny files. If you check this box the backup will become faster, but it might fail in some cases.

Normally, Akeeba Backup forces the current backup step to finish when it's about to move to a different backup domain, e.g. after finishing backing up the database and getting ready to backup the files of your site. This gives the backup engine the chance to do garbage collection and free up resources.

You can enable that option to make the backup 1-2 seconds faster, risking a backup failure in resource-restricted servers. We consider it a generally unsafe option and we advise against using it.

Normally, Akeeba Backup forces the current backup step to finish when it's about to move to a different finalization operation e.g. after finishing considering quotas and it's about to start post-processing a backup archive. This gives the backup engine the chance to do garbage collection and free up resources.

You can enable that option to make the backup 1-2 seconds faster, risking a backup failure in resource-restricted servers. We consider it a generally unsafe option and we advise against using it.

If your server is using the CGI or FastCGI interface to PHP, checking this option will make it less likely that the backup dies due to a PHP timeout issue. We consider it generally safe checking this box as we have never observed or got reports of any side-effects.