Google Drive integration. On popular request we added native suport for Google Drive. Please read the documentation! Unlike other storage options file and folder names are not guaranteed to be unique in Google Drive, making for some interesting potential problems.
UTF8MB4 support under Joomla! 3.5. Akeeba Backup was already able to backup and restore database tables encoded in UTF8MB4 (Multibyte Unicode). Now you can use multibyte characters (e.g. Emoji) in the backup comment as well.
Ability to downgrade UTF8MB4 data to UTF8 during restoration. One challenge with the new UTF8MB4 support in Joomla! 3.5 is how do you move your site to a server which does not support UTF8MB4. Such a downgrade is nearly impossible to do manually. Luckily for you, Akeeba Backup can automatically perform the downgrade for you as long as you enable the option to convert the data to utf8 before restoring your database.
This is not a typo! After considering the vast amount of changes in third party services Akeeba Backup integrates with (such as Dropbox and Amazon S3) we decided to reinstate compatibility with Joomla! 1.6, 1.7, 2.5, 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4 and 3.5.
Please note that we do NOT recommend using Joomla! 1.x / 2.x or 3.0 to 3.3 inclusive on production sites due to major security issues. Support for these old versions is intended to give you the option of taking a full site backup prior to upgrading to the latest available Joomla! release.
The minimum required PHP version is 5.3.03. All versions of PHP from 5.3.03 onwards are supported, including 5.4, 5.5, 5.6 and the just released PHP 7.0. The component will not work on PHP 5.2 or earlier and will, in fact, refuse to install on it. We'd like to remind you that Joomla! 3.4 and earlier does NOT support PHP 7. Joomla! 3.5 (currently in beta) does support PHP 7. Akeeba Backup will work just fine in a Joomla! 3.5 site running on PHP 7.0.
Note: there is no such thing as PHP 6. PHP versions jumped from 5.6 to 7.0. Why? Well, it's a long story. TL;DR: It doesn't have to make sense, just accept it.