Support

The PHP version warning is permanent and cannot be disabled. It's placed there to let you know that your host is using PHP 5.2 which has been end-of-life since January 2011. We will drop support for it very soon. FYI, at the time of this writing the officially supported versions of PHP are 5.3 and 5.4.

Your version very old, obsolete and vulnerable. You can continue using Akeeba Backup, but you must seriously consider upgrading to PHP 5.3 or 5.4. For what is worth, future versions of Joomla! will require PHP 5.3 to work. At this moment there is no reason whatsoever not to upgrade to PHP 5.3. All modern web software (read: anything published since mid-2011) is absolutely compatible with PHP 5.3 or even requires it. Please stop thinking about it and update your servers to PHP 5.3 today.

Regarding the permissions warning message, it's a little more complicated. Some servers report the permissions in a very strange way. Folders are reported as having 04755 permissions instead of 0755 and files are reported as having 0100644 permissions instead of 0644. This caused the permissions change code to run. Due to a typo in the code it would always report a failure and the warning box was shown. The funny thing is that this code is there since the early days of Akeeba Backup 3.2. Due to a different bug, the warning was never shown even when it should. After fixing some display issues in Akeeba Backup 3.6 the warning box would now get displayed. I was only able to debug it when someone offered me access to an affected server. All my servers seem to be reporting the permissions as 0755 and 0644, never triggering the bug.

I'm now working on Joomla! 3.0 compatibility. When I'm finished with that I will release a new version of Akeeba Backup. Till then anyone who is affected can ignore this warning message.