Improved Smart Search table filtering. Joomla 4 changed the way Smart Search works. Moreover it introduced saved filters. These filters would be lost when restoring a site; not any more. Further to that, we are now doing a partial backup of the Smart Search terms table instead of removing it completely. This means that after restoration you will still need to run the Smart Search indexing but it will complete much faster, without losing any terms already present in your original site.
Much improved FTP functions for uploading backup archives and transferring sites. The initial directory is now interpreted more loosely, similarly to what many FTP client software does. If left blank, the directory will be understood as relative to whichever default directory you get when connecting into FTP instead of the absolute filesystem root — but note that this is not recommended as changing the configuration of your FTP server may cause problems with downloading your backup archives and enforcing remote quotas! FTP copying is also improved, taking placing directly at the FTP server side isntead of requiring downloading and reuploading the file. Further to that, the FTP features now support usernames which look like emails (e.g.
Upload to Azure BLOB Storage now supports chunked uploads, files up to 190.7TB (up from 64Mb). We went back to the drawing board and reimplemented the Upload to Azure BLOB Storage code using the newest version of the Azure BLOB Storage API (version 2019-12-12) which allows individual files uploaded as a single chunk to be up to 5000MiB (up from 64MiB), the maximum chunk size to be 4000MiB (up from 4MiB) and the maximum chunk uploaded file size to be 190.7TiB (up from 3.05GiB). Note that the actual maximum file limit for chunked uploads is 50,000 times the chunk size, therefore if you are using a chunk size of 10MiB your maximum upload file size is 50,000 x 10MiB = 488.28GiB which is still plenty enough for most practical use cases!
OneDrive for Business: you can now use Drives other than your personal. Previous versions of our backup software from late 2019 onwards allowed you to use OneDrive accounts registered through a school or organisation. However, there was a catch: you could only use your personal Drive. You did not have access to any other drives you were allowed access to by your group. In this version of our software we allow you to use any Drive you have access to. If you do not change the configuration then you will still be using the default (personal) drive for your Microsoft account.
Bug fixes and minor improvements. Please take a look at the CHANGELOG below.
Akeeba Backup version 9 will only run on Joomla 4. If you still have a Joomla 3 site, don't worry! Akeeba Backup 8 will still be maintained and receive support from the release of Joomla 3.10 on August 17th, 2021 up to August 17th, 2023. Do note that Akeeba Backup 8 will no longer receive major new features. These will only be implemented on Akeeba Backup 9.
Also note that starting August 17th, 2021 we no longer support Akeeba Backup 8 on Joomla except for the use case of upgrading from Joomla 3 and with the sole intent of updating it to Akeeba Backup 9.
Please consult our Compatibility page. It explains our version support policy and lists which versions of our software are compatible with which versions of Joomla and PHP.