Support

Mark,

I've seen your other thread where you did find where the FTP feature is (the same place it has always been) and your problems with RS!Firewall which you wrongly attributed to Akeeba Backup, despite the error message clearly pointing you to another direction. But I don't want to answer this ticket repeating everything I said in the other ticket.

Remote Control has been discontinued on May 2011. That's last year. One year, Mark. It's not like I discontinued it yesterday, so why all the drama? Besides, it wasn't a random act, there is a very strong reasoning behind it (which I am sure you didn't read).

Let's forget that for a minute. Remote Control never allowed you to upload your backup to a remote FTP directory. What it tried to do is connect to your site by FTP and download the backup archive locally. The big problem was that this was very unreliable and failed very frequently. If I wanted to really fix it, I would have to hire three developers -one for Windows, one for Linux and one for Mac OS X- to write three different applications using appropriate technologies on each platform. Someone would have to pay the $150,000 USD per year that would have cost me. Would you be willing to pay $750+ USD per year to have Remote Control? Yeah, only 200 people were using it according to my download logs. I guess not. That's why I discontinued it. I can't spend more than I make for a product virtually nobody uses.

Further to that, Remote Control was written back in 2008 when I wanted a good way to easily backup my sites automatically and download the backup files locally. Fast forward May 2011, when I decided to discontinue Remote Control. Akeeba Backup Professional allowed you (and still does!) to automatically transfer your backups to Dropbox as soon as they are taken. Dropbox automatically syncs them to your local Windows / Linux / Mac computer. So the automatic download locally is taken care of. As for the automatic backup, well, you can either log in & backup the site, or you can set up a CRON job with one of the available ways. Three months later we worked together with Webcron.org and had their dirt cheap service operate smoothly with Akeeba Backup's front-end backup feature, so even those people who can't get a CRON job set up on their server have a viable alternative. Simply put, Remote Control was made irrelevant. Moreover, the majority of people using Remote Control asked me to make it possible to be scheduled and run in the background. Hence the Remote CLI was born.

On one hand I could propose you a 750$/year solution which might or might work and could make my business fail (therefore cease all development of Akeeba Backup and everything else I make), or a 40 EUR/year solution which works PERFECTLY and ensures I can actually make a living and keep on developing my software. What do you think I would propose? The solution which would be the end of Akeeba Backup, or the solution which ensures that Akeeba Backup can live on? It's a no-brainer for me.

Finally, all the features which were removed from the Core version had a reason for being removed. You know what the reason is? Users bitching about features whose documentation they never read. I've received too many emails which were along the lines of "you dirtbag, you publish broken software" because the user did not bother reading the documentation which explained exactly how to use the feature and accused me of having plotted an elaborate scheme of publishing broken software for extorting money for support (yeah, like 7.79 EUR for one hour's work is anywhere near the 50 EUR / hour I was making doing freelance work before going commercial). There's only so much a man can take. So I got really pissed off and thought "OK, if you people don't want to bother reading the docs and accuse me of being a fraud, screw that I am removing the features which are not absolutely necessary". Upload to remote FTP was one of them.

I hope you now see my point of view. I'm not a bad guy who wants to extort your money. I mean, hell, if someone would agree to pay the living expenses for me and my family, I'd have no problem giving everything away for free! Do we have any takers? No? No. That's why I have to charge a really low fee for the paid version. Yes, it is a LOW fee. Compared to what? Let's consider VaultPress ($4200/year/site) or BackupBuddy ($150/year for unlimited sites or $75/year/site). You pay pennies to the dollar and, unlike those guys, when you have a problem you get to talk to the actual developer, not a script-reading support guy who may or may not have a clue. Think about it.