Support

If you are receiving a blank page or a fatal error when trying to access Akeeba Backup and/or receive an AJAX error during backup right after upgrading to Akeeba Backup 3.5.x, please note that this is the result of a partial upgrade. There is a known bug in the Joomla! extensions installer (which is also used by our Live Update to perform the actual update). When upgrading to a version which has a different count of top-level directories, Joomla!'s extension installer "forgets" to copy all files and folders or remove the old ones. This usually happens when upgrading from Core to Professional and when upgrading between minor releases, e.g. 3.4 to 3.5.

The solution is very simple. First DO NOT UNINSTALL Akeeba Backup and DO NOT DOWNGRADE to an earlier release. The former will remove your backups and settings. The latter will cause Akeeba Backup to fail. Instead, go to our Downloads page and download the latest installation package of Akeeba Backup. Go to your site's back-end. Go to Extensions, Manage Plugins and make sure that the "System - System Restore Points"(*) plugin is either not installed or, if installed, is not published. Then go to Extensions, Manage Extensions and use the Browse button to locate the installation package you downloaded. Then click on "Upload and Install". You may have to repeat the installation a second time.

If this doesn't help, you are hit by another bug in the Joomla! installer. When a file already exists and is unwriteable, Joomla! will not overwrite it with the updated copy and will not throw an error. Furthermore, on some sites, obsolete files which are supposed to be removed in fact do not get removed and no error message is thrown. In order to work around that, you will have to perform some manual work. Remove the following folders:
- administrator/components/com_akeeba EXCEPT the administrator/components/com_akeeba/backup directory and the administrator/components/com_akeeba/akeeba/serverkey.php file. If you remove that directory and that file you will lose your existing backups and/or settings.
- components/com_akeeba
- administrator/modules/mod_akadmin
- media/com_akeeba
- plugins/system/plg_srp
- plugins/system/plg_akeebaupdatecheck
- plugins/system/plg_aklazy
- plugins/system/plg_oneclickaction
Now you can re-install Akeeba Backup. Please note that if you are using any of our other components it is advisable that you first upgrade all of them to their latest versions.

If you are using Akeeba Backup Core please remove the administrator/modules/mod_akadmin directory completely. In theory it should be automatically done during Akeeba Backup's upgrade but it seems that the XML manifest file in earlier versions was buggy and doesn't allow this module to be removed automatically. Users of Akeeba Backup Professional needn't worry; the module will be upgraded as part of their Akeeba Backup Professional installation.

In rare cases this may not help. In this case just remove the libraries/fof directory from your site. Then download Akeeba Backup's installation ZIP archive to your PC and extract it. Upload the for directory which was just extracted into your site's libraries directory so that you now have a libraries/fof directory.

VERY IMPORTANT CLARIFICATION: Please note that these ARE NOT bugs in Akeeba Backup. These are all caused by Joomla! bugs and/or bad file/folder ownership and permissions. As such they are outside of our control and can not be "fixed" by us. The closest you can get to fixing them is using a decent host using suPHP, mod_fpm (FastCGI Process Manager), mod_itk or mod_suid to execute PHP in a safe manner. In fact, all updates attempted in quality hosts like Rochen and CloudAccess.net by our team members never resulted to any kind of issue whatsoever. Coincidence? I don't think so.

(*) The name of the plugin may be localised if your back-end language is other than English. In this case use the filter drop-down called "- Select type -" to "system" and look for the entry where the Element column reads "srp".