Compatibility with obsolete PHP 5.6 version. PHP 5.6.0 to 5.6.5 inclusive were released more than two years ago. These old, obsolete, EXTREMELY INSECURE (= you ARE going to get hacked if you use them) versions also have very signifficant bugs in the way they handle code optimisation. These bugs cause our software to fail when trying to read the permissions of certain files. This is NOT an issue with our software, it's an issue with PHP itself. By pure coincidence these PHP bugs were not triggered by previous versions of our software. This version works around this issue by reordering three lines of code. It's the code equivalent of changing "drink water, move glass to left hand, touch nose" to "move glass to left hand, touch nose, drink water". If you are not using the very latest PHP 5.6 version (5.6.25 at the time of this writing) your site WILL get hacked because of KNOWN security issues.
Working towards PHP 7.1 compatibility. PHP 7.1 has deprecated the mcrypt encryption library which is used for settings encryption and JPS encrypted backup archives. This version of Akeeba Backup can use either the mcrypt or the OpenSSL extensions of PHP for encryption. One of them must be installed for encryption to work. On the plus side, the OpenSSL extension is much faster, leading to faster backups.
Missing files from the backup on very few servers. This usually occurs when running a backup through CLI / CRON (through the akeeba-backup.php file). In these cases the size of the CLI backup will appear much smaller than the size of a backup taken from the backend of your site. This issue is highly server-specific and affected only very few servers. We made some optimizations to the backup engine which circumvent this issue.
Better detection of third party issues that break Akeeba Backup. This includes CloudFlare's disastrous “Rocket Loader” feature which breaks all JavaScript in Joomla; also table corruption due to the database server's fault. Now you will be warned about these issues and given instructions to fix them.
Improvements to Microsoft Azure support. Now using the API version 2015-04-05 which is the latest at the time of this writing. Furthermore, you can store files larged than 64Mb.
Local time zone support in Manage Backups page. You can select whether to see GMT time (like previous versions) or local time for the backup start time in the Manage Backups page. This setting does not affect backup file naming where GMT time is always used (otherwise the naming of your backups would confusingly differ based on who and how is backing up your site).
PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL Server / Azure SQL Server support in the Core version. The 0.1% of you who don't use MySQL can now use Akeeba Backup Core to backup and restore your site on PostgreSQL or MS SQL Server. Please note that you can not restore to a different database server technology. That is to say that you can not take a backup of a MySQL site and restore it to a PostgreSQL server or vice versa.
Fixed issues with the displayed backup size. When you had enabled the “Process each part immediately” option but not the “Delete archive after processing” option (or when you had chosen the post- processing engine is “No post-processing”) the recorded backup archive size was larger (typically double) the actual backup size. So if you suddenly see the backup size dropping in half after installing this version of Akeeba Backup don't freak out and don't ask for support; just check the actual size of your backups and you'll see they didn't change between the previous version and this one.
We only support Joomla! 3.4 or later, including 3.5. We strongly advise you to run Joomla! 3.4.7 or later for security reasons. Older versions of Joomla! have known major security issues which are being actively exploited to hack sites. Do note that these security issues were fixed on Christmas Eve 2015 thanks to the effort of our development team who contributed their time and knowledge to make Joomla! more secure.
Support for PHP 5.3 is discontinued. It's end of life since August 2014 and widely considered a security risk, unfit for production sites. Our software requries PHP 5.4 or later and is compatible with PHP 5.4, 5.5, 5.6 and 7.x. We strongly recommend using PHP 5.6 or 7.x.
We'd like to remind you that Joomla! 3.4 does NOT support PHP 7. PHP 7 is only supported by Joomla! 3.5.0 and later versions. Akeeba Backup will work perfectly fine (and very fast!) on a Joomla! 3.5 or later site running on PHP 7.