This release addresses a number of issued discovered since the release of Akeeba Backup 3.6.12. Moreover, this version improves a feature present in older versions of Akeeba Backup, the automatic Akeeba Backup schema fix. If Akeeba Backup detects that its database tables are missing or not up-to-date it will attempt to create or fix them respectively. This is a common issue with sites being upgraded from older versions of Joomla! or when an update goes wrong and you have to re-apply it. In that last case Joomla! sometimes doesn't get to run the upgrade SQL commands specified in the installation package, leading to the notorious "stuck at Updating statistics (75%)" issue which prevents you from taking a successful backup of your site.
Furthermore, this release improves handling of multi-part backup archives as far as the ZIP format and importing from S3 is concerned, Joomla! 3 compatibility, MySQL 5.6 compatibility and ACL privileges.
This version requires PHP 5.3 or later. The rationale behind this is explained in our statement of mid-February 2013. It won't install on hosts running PHP 5.2 or earlier.
Unfortunately, due to a long-standing bug in Joomla!'s extensions installer, if your host has PHP 5.2 and you try to install the component on it the installation won't proceed but it will also make the Akeeba Backup icon disappear from the Components menu. You can still access the component by directly visiting its back-end URL, e.g. http://www.example.com/administrator/index.php?option=com_akeeba, or by uninstalling and reinstalling the previous version, losing all your configuration and data.
This is a Joomla! bug, not an issue with our software. There is no workaround. The other alternative would be letting the new version install but not work at all due to the PHP version incompatibility. We urge affected users to file a bug report with the Joomla! project.