Akeeba Backup for Joomla!

Tuesday, 12 May 2015 06:26 CDT

westiefan

EXTREMELY IMPORTANT: Please attach a ZIP file containing your Akeeba Backup log file in order for us to help you with any backup or restoration issue. If the file is over 2Mb, please upload it on your server and post a link to it.

Description of my issue:

Hi Nicholas,

Sorry to bother you but I have recently upgraded one of my clients from the Akeeba Core to the Akeeba Pro backup so that I can do remote backups etc for them.

However, although the upgrade installation did not report any errors, and appeared to complete without any errors, I noticed that the System Restore Point plugin was not installed, and the extended CP icons were not visible.

On the clients server it is not possinble for me to access anywhere except the asmin area of the site as I do not host it directly. However, I was looking at my own site and I noticed that I also had the same issue (e.g. upgraded to Akeeba Pro but the Sytem restore Points and Extended Control Panel icons are missing etc), so I followed the instructions to install the upgrade again (on my site) and as suggested by the documentation, I uploaded and installed it twice, but without success (I should note that I followed this instruction on my client site also to no avail!).

Just for the sake of clarity, on my clients site the upgrade to the Pro version only happened last week using the Akeeba Pro 4.2.0 version, but on my own site the original upgrade was undertaken long before you switched to using the Joomla Installer, but the end result is effectively the same on both sites (I have checked a few other client sites and they appear to be fine, so it does appear to be an isolated issue).

Is there a way that I can manually install the missing plugins etc that would complete the upgrade? Although I have not tried it on my clietn site yet (as I am still waing for the client to set up the CRON job), I can confirm that in the case of my own site the automated backups do syill work, the only issue for my site (and my clients site as far a s I can see) is that the system restore plugin and the extended icon set in the control panel are missing.

Any ideas?

Regards

John

Tuesday, 12 May 2015 06:37 CDT

westiefan

Hi Nicholas,

Please ignore the bit about the missing Icons in the control panel, I was comparing them to the wrong screenshot of the control panel, so my apologies.

However, the System Restore Point plugin is definitely misssing, so please advise on this one.

Regards

John

Tuesday, 12 May 2015 07:01 CDT

nicholas

The System Restore Points feature was removed in version 4.2.0. Since we removed Joomla! 2.5 support we decided to remove some features which no longer made sense. Per the changelog:

- Removed Joomla! 2.5 support
- Removed post-setup page; these messages are now handled through Joomla!'s Post-Installation Messages feature
- Removed the Site Transfer Wizard. You can use the DirectFTP/DirectSFTP engines; or use Upload to FTP/SFTP and check the Upload Kickstart option (preferred method)
- Removed the System Restore Point feature; please make a full site backup before updating your extensions. Joomla! 3.x requires full backups due to the way ACL, Categories, Tags and Content History work; that's why the SRP feature was removed.
- Removed Extension Filters. For the same reasons we removed SRP: this cannot work as expected in Joomla! 3.x.
- Removed Lite Mode in the front-end. Smartphones are now the norm and Joomla! 3.x offers a responsive back-end. Just use it from your smartphone!

If you ever tried to restore a System Restore Point you may have noticed the problems it was creating. Custom item ACLs, Categories, Tags and Content History are all tied together with the #__assets and all the #__ucm_* tables. The way these tables are designed (nested sets) makes it impossible to backup individual items. Moreover there's no way for a third party component like Akeeba Backup to know even which of their records correspond to which extension. This made SRP backups only usable with extensions that store no data in the database. But in this case you don't need SRP backups, you can just uninstall the new version and install the old one back. Therefore the SRP feature was obsolete.

Why didn't we remove it earlier? When these problems first appeared with Joomla! 1.6 nobody was sure whether Joomla! would stick with this database schema or exactly how big of an impact that would cause. This only became apparent midway through the Joomla! 2.5 release. But still, Joomla! 2.5 only had everything tied up through the #__assets table and the extensions using that feature were very few. When Joomla! 3.2 introduced Tags and along with it the UCM tables it was the kiss of death for System Restore Points. A single item in a third party application could have pieces of its data stored in a dozen different tables with no way to know which data goes where and how to restore it. So the only thing we could do was deprecate this feature in Akeeba Backup 4.0 and remove it in 4.2.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Tuesday, 12 May 2015 07:45 CDT

westiefan

Hi Nicholas,

Thank you for your very comprehensive reply. My apologies that I generally do not read the changelogs as I trust your components and know that your updates almost never cause any issues (and if they do you are very quick to fix them!!).

Although I use have used the System Restore Points when updating, I have never had the need to restore from an SRP, so I am fortunate that I have never been affected by the issues you outlined.

Given the points that you have raised, I will disable the SRP's in the last few of my clients J2.5 sites and stick to full or incremental backups only (all supported clients with J3 are already on the lates Akeeba Pro version, so I assume they will also have had the SRP's removed).

Thank you once again fror the great support that you provide, it is always much appreciated.

Best Regards

John

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