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Akeeba Backup for Joomla!

#35055 Bug: "Output directory unwritable" with certain folder names

Posted in ‘Akeeba Backup for Joomla! 4 & 5’
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Environment Information

Joomla! version
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PHP version
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Akeeba Backup version
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Latest post by on Thursday, 20 May 2021 20:17 CDT

hansspiess

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Description of my issue: With a folder structure like this:

./mysite/ <-- contains joomla instance with akeeba backup
./mysite-backup/ <-- specified as backup destination

i am able to save the profile. however, the specidied path that is expressed as [rootparent]/mysite-backup first, gets rewritten to [root]-backup after saving the profile, and in the overview page i get the error "output directory unwritable", even if it is.

tampe125
Akeeba Staff

Hello,

thank you for reporting this, I will take a look into it. In the meantime the only solution is to use a different output folder.

Davide Tampellini

Developer and Support Staff

🇮🇹Italian: native 🇬🇧English: good • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Rome (UTC +1)
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager

This cannot be fixed. We need to convert the output directory path to use variables to make it work when restoring the backup on a different folder / server.

Moreover, your issue is extremely rare and easy to work around.

It's rare because most sites use a site folder name similar to public_html, htdocs, www and so on. It's extremely rare that the host uses a different convention and even more rare that someone would host multiple sites under the same account AND choose to name the backup directories using the same prefix as the site's root.

It's easy to work around by renaming your backup output directories. One idea is to create a backups folder with one subdirectory per site you are backing up.

In short, what you are experiencing does happen but we won't fix it. Fixing it would break a far more important feature (automatically convert output directory paths to use variables). Trying to work around this by doing path splitting and tree comparisons is not only slower, it also causes problems on Windows where both / and \ are valid path separators BUT the special prefix \\ means something else entirely (UNC path). In other words, the "better" fix would break backups on sites which are hosted on UNC paths which is more common and far more important than the backup output directory naming.

All things considered, we are not going to address this issue. We are aware of it but we'd rather have an extremely rare and easy to work around issue than a fundamental issue which would break backups for far more people without any possible workaround.

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!

hansspiess

Hi Nicholas,

thank you for the exhaustive explanation! I totally understand the decision not to fix that edge-case bug. However, i'd suggest to maybe mention this in the documentation when explaining Output Directory configuration. Since i was not aware of this behaviour, i investigated several other things i thought would be possible causes which took me some time.

Best,
Hans

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager

Fair enough. I will update the documentation.

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!

System Task
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