Final release with PHP 5.6 support. This is the last version of Akeeba Backup which suports PHP 5.6. The next version 7.2.0, will only support PHP 7.1 and later.
WordPress restoration: fatal error applying new administrator password. This problem in Akeeba Solo and Backup for WordPress versions 7.1.4 and 7.1.4.1 was caused by a file being the wrong character case. The root cause is a variety of behaviour changes in macOS, the Operating System of our build machine for the past 9 years. Even though the issue was correctly identified before releasing 7.1.4.1, an esoteric issue with regards to the filesystem behavior meant that the file was the wrong case again, even though it appeared otherwise on our disk. For version 7.1.4.2 we have switched our build and test machine to Ubuntu 20.04 with a case-sensitive filesystem to prevent similar issues in the future.
Automatically exclude Cache folder if it exists (WordPress). If your WP site has a cache folder set up its contents will be automatically excluded during backup.
Multipart upload to BackBlaze B2 might fail due to a silent B2 behavior change. We identified a situation where the upload of large archives to BackBlaze B2 would fail. While we were expecting the upload to fail so we can request a new upload URL per B2's documentation. However, what would actually happen is that the B2 API would send a different error code than the one documented, confusing our upload code which ultimately treated it as an error. We are now also expecting the real code B2 sends in this case, not just the one they document. Do note that this kind of discrepancies are common; we had to implement something as observed versus as documented in almost evey remote storage engine we ship with Akeeba Backup.
OneDrive upload failure if a part upload starts >3600s after token issuance. This another case of something behaving differently than documented. According to OneDrive's documentation the upload of individual chunks would fail with a token validation error if it takes place over an hour since the token was originally issued. We expected that event so we can reissue a token and continue the upload. What actually happens is that the upload continues to work even though the token has expired. We do not receive an upload error until when we start trying to upload the next backup archive file, an error condition that is not documented. We have updated our code to expect both error conditions, in case Microsoft decides to make another implementation change without updating its documentation again.
We only officially support using our software with PHP 5.6, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 or 7.4.
Our software should still run on PHP 7.0 and 7.1 but we are no longer testing our software with this PHP version or consider it a supported environment for our software.
The next version of our software (7.2.0) will no longer work on PHP 5.6 and 7.0 at all.
We strongly advise you to run either of the two latest available version branches of PHP on a branch currently maintained by the PHP project for security and performance reasons. Older versions of PHP have known major security issues which are being actively exploited to hack sites and they have stopped receiving security updates, leaving you exposed to these issues. Moreover, they are slower, therefore consuming more server resources to perform the same tasks.
Kindly note that our policy is to officially support only the PHP versions which are not yet End Of Life per the official PHP project with a voluntarily extension of support for 6 to 9 months after they become End of Life. After that time we stop providing any support for these obsolete versions of PHP without any further notice. New version branches of PHP will be supported experimentally starting sometime during their Release Candidate phase and fully about 4 to 8 weeks after the first stable version of that branch is released.
We officially only support the latest WordPress 5.x release.
Our software should also work on WordPress 4.9 and ClassicPress 1.x since we do not rely on any features added in later WordPress versions. However, we no longer test against these versions of WordPress / ClassicPress and do not consider them supported environments for our software.
We fully support single site and multi-site installations of WordPress. Multi-site installations can be converted on restoration from directory-based to subdomain-based or vice versa. You cannot restore a single site backup into a multi-site installation. You cannot restore / convert a blog of a multi-site network installation into a single site WordPress installation (in fact, there is no official WordPress method to do that safely).
Using our software with versions of WordPress earlier than 4.9 may be possible but we cannot provide any support for them. Furthermore, we very strongly discourage using our software with WordPress versions earlier than 4.6 because some WordPress features we rely on for our software to function properly did not exist in these very old, End of Life versions. We generally strongly advise against running old, no longer maintained versions of WordPress for security and performance reasons.