Support

It's not a new feature. It's been there for nearly 14 years.

I introduced this feature all the way back in 2010. Back then it was a module —not a plugin— which was inserting its output to the Joomla 1.5 and 1.6 Control Panel page via the PHP equivalent of necromancy as there was no way in Joomla itself to display anything in its Control Panel page.

I contributed the Quick Icons feature, which used plugins instead of modules, to Joomla 1.7; it was one of the “please build this for us” items in the Joomla 1.6/1.7/2.5 roadmap and having done that for years in my own software it was only natural I would contribute it. It was very well thought out and forward thinking; not that it mattered in the end of the day, as we'll see. Throughout the lifetime of Joomla 1.7 and 2.5 you would see the backup icon like you do now in the front and centre of your Joomla Control Panel.

Joomla! 3.x back in 2012 moved (rather stupidly, if you ask me) all Quick Icons to the left-hand sidebar, amongst a metric tonne of random crap. The backup icon was there all those 11 years, you just didn't quite notice it because it very much hidden amidst the garbage you had grown accustomed to ignore.

Joomla! 4 bastardised the concept of Quick Icons (missing the fact that each icon plugin already communicated the category it was to be rendered in, but I digress), but at least moved the Quick Icons back to the front and centre of the Control Panel page where they belong! That said, due to a silly bug, the "out of date" message wasn't being triggered in Akeeba Backup 9.0 to 9.5. This was fixed in Akeeba Backup 9.6.

You can of course configure the Quick Icon – Akeeba Backup plugin to work the way you want it to. There's an option to change the amount of time to wait until it tells you it's out of date (the default is 24 hours; I am assuming most users are taking daily backups), but you can completely disable the warnings (out of date and last backup ended with error) by toggling the very first option it presents you. If you do the latter, the icon only acts as a quick shortcut to taking a backup. Exactly what you want!

PS: You can of course tell it which backup profile to use instead of always using the default. I added this feature in Akeeba Backup 3.3.a1 some 13 years ago.