Support

You will need to contact your host about this. It's impossible to deal on our end.

Exclusions in Akeeba Backup are either file or directory exclusions. When we are listing the contents of a directory we are given a list of entry names. We have to determine if an entry is a directory or a file before applying the exclusions.

The problem is that your host has a glaringly obvious misconfiguration which leads to PHP erroring out as soon as we query the nature of that entry (hey PHP, tell us, is this a file or a directory?).

The misconfiguration is that your host linked the mysqladmin folder into your web root. This means that they do not understand how their web server, Apache, actually works! You don't need to create symlinks to give access to an application stored outside the web root. You can have an Alias / AliasMatch directive which does. In fact, Apache [url=https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/urlmapping.html#outside]has an entire documentation page about this.

The only way to prevent this issue without the host's intervention requires raising our minimum version requirement to PHP 7. Under PHP 7 this fatal error is actually an exception of the ErrorException type which can be caught, reported, and sidestepped. The problem is that the ErrorException class only exists since PHP 7.0. If we try to catch exceptions of the ErrorException type on PHP 5 it will cause a fatal error. That is, the code to catch a potential fatal error will always cause a fatal error. Therefore we cannot fix this issue until June 2019 when we will drop support for PHP 5 from our software. I hope that now you understand one of the hundreds of reasons why we are asking our users to upgrade their version of PHP as soon as possible. There are issues, mostly edge cases, which cannot be dealt with when we are chained to old versions of PHP which don't provide the necessary tools to address these issues.