After three months of intense coding, testing and site design, we are pleased to announce the immediate availability of JoomlaPack's successor Akeeba Backup 3.0 (alpha).
What's Akeeba Backup?
For those who haven't followed the blog posts, newsletter announcements and Twitter messages about the name change, we'd like to give you the executive summary. JoomlaPack is changing its name to Akeeba Backup effective release 3.0. This change can be attributed to an assortment of factors, most importantly our not willing to be perceived as building our reputation around the Joomla! trademark. That being said, Akeeba Backup is major step forward for our backup software. The new release brings a wealth of new features and a practically rewritten backup engine which performs faster and uses less resources than its predecessor.
Release notes
Even though this release is marked as "alpha", we consider it stable for use on production sites. The "alpha" tag simply denotes that not all features planned for this release have been implemented yet.This release also marks a major change in the software's availability. There are two editions, with different feature sets, available. Akeeba Backup Core is distributed free of charge and contains all the essential tools to easily produce backups of small to very big sites. It is almost functionally equivalent to the JoomlaPack 2.x Plus editions. On the other hand, the professional users can get Akeeba Backup Professional with a truckload of extra features for a low-priced (30 Euros) one year subscription. Both versions are distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License 3.0, which means that you can install them on as many sites as you want, giving you excellent value for your money.
On top of offering two different editions of Akeeba Backup, we are also offering a support service which goes above and beyond what we can provide in the forum. The Enhanced Support is a subscription based service which allows you to submit highest priority, private support tickets which will be answered directly from the lead developer within hours. What's more, I can log in to your server and deal with the problem directly, cutting down the required time to provide a solution from a few days to a few hours.
Do note that both subscription services are optional and not a pre-requisite to using Akeeba Backup or getting support! Akeeba Backup Core remains free of charge and top quality as it has always been. The Support Forum remains free of charge and attended to on a daily basis, as it has always been. When we say that we value the spirit of Open Source / Free Software, we really mean it. We strictly abide by our creed: great software, immediate support, thorough documentation.
Download and support
You can download the software from our download page and, should you run into any problems, do not hesitate to post on our support forum. If you want to financially contribute to the project's growth, you can use the donation button on the front page of this site, or consider subscribing to our professional services.The documentation is currently being written from scratch. We thank you for your patience, promising to have it uploaded as soon as humanly possible.
Short-term roadmap
Although there is a lot of innovation packed in this release, front-end and back-end, we still do not consider it complete. Some features are notably missing from this first release, but will be made available in the next (3.0 beta) release:
- PRO Transfer to FTP. DirectFTP is good enough for many uses, but using it on very large sites is an overkill. The next release will support uploading backup archives to an off-site FTP server.
- PRO Cloud Backup. Similar to the above, we'll allow you to upload your backup archives to Amazon's S3. This will ensure that you can enjoy safe, off-site data storage. More cloud storage services will be added in future releases.
- PRO Integrated restoration. This feature is currently missing, as we're in the process of rewriting it to handle its task in a more graceful way than its previous iteration.
- Hyper compressed JPA archives. As you all know, all files over roughly 1Mb are stored uncompressed in ZIP and JPA archives. The 3.0 beta version will include an update to the JPA archiving engine which allows compressed storage of all files, without timing out, practically achieving similar compression ratios to the tar.gz format.
- Improved Kickstart. We are aware of many shortcomings of the current Kickstart architecture and we're rewriting it.
- Full Joomla! 1.6 compatibility. The alpha installs and runs on the latest SVN version of Joomla! 1.6, but there are still a few cosmetic issues to be ironed out.
Please note that the features marked with PRO will only be made available to subscribers of the Professional edition.
On behalf of Akeeba Developers,
Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos
Lead developer and project leader