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Your tone of voice is not conducive to productive, professional communication. Do not be scornful, unless you want to be replied to in kind. Thank you.

The fact is that the migration did work, and thousands of people used it without a problem, when it was released and while it was supported i.e. between August 2021 and August 2023. In fact, it was the ONLY time we provided two years of support for updates between major Joomla! versions. In all previous cases (1.0 to 1.5, 1.5 to 2.5, 2.5 to 3.x) we only gave between 6 and 12 months of support. The two reasons leading to that decision was that a. Joomla! 3 to 4 was a big departure in terms of underlying technology which led to updates taking longer and b. we had to introduce a migration step which would further complicate some edge cases.

When Joomla! 3 became End of Life in August 2023, Akeeba Backup 8 became End of Life as well, as we have announced back in early August 2021. Since the migration needs to use Akeeba Backup 8 to decode the database data before it can migrate it, the migration was never tested again after Joomla! 3 became End of Life. So, what happens when you try to migrate data on Joomla! 4.4, 5.0, and 5.1? Nobody tried that and it's not supported anyway.

I know for a fact that the changes which started taking place during the development phase of Joomla! 5.0, itself taking place after Akeeba Backup 8 became End of Life, mean that Akeeba Backup 8 cannot run correctly on Joomla! 5. This alone would indeed make the migration fail on Joomla! 5, albeit I cannot tell you exactly how. Since you're saying no settings are transferred it tells me the decoding failed completely, which is definitely consistent with the effects I would imagine possible given the changes having taken place in Joomla! 5 (I think it should work on 4.4 given that we had people who migrated their sites recently and didn't report any issues, but the lack of evidence of failure is not evidence of success in this case).

The only thing you would be right about is that the migration should have been removed from Akeeba Backup 9 last year, which is indeed an oversight I am going to fix in the next version.

It should now be evident what the problem is. You are trying to perform a migration in a configuration of software that's not supported because none of that software is contemporaneous to each other. The correct approach is to perform your upgrade in stages, so that you are only running contemporaneous software which will work with each other.

The indicated approach in your case is, therefore:

• Upgrade the original Joomla! 3 site to Joomla! 3.10.
• Update Akeeba Backup 8 to version 8.3.1.
• Upgrade from Joomla! 3.10 to 4.1 (using the update package from Joomla's Downloads page and Joomla's feature which allows you to upload an update package).
• Install Akeeba Backup 9.6.1.
• Do the migration from Akeeba Backup 8 to 9.
• Uninstall Akeeba Backup 8, FOF, and FEF.
• Update Joomla! to 4.4.
• Update Akeeba Backup to the latest 9.x version supported on Joomla! 4.4.
• Upgrade Joomla! to 5.x.
• Update Akeeba Backup to the latest 9.x version supported on Joomla! 5.x (at the time of the writing there will be no newer version than the one two steps ago, but if someone is reading this several months into the future this may no longer be the case).

The important thing to remember when doing an upgrade to a new major Joomla! version is that most extensions will ONLY allow you to do an upgrade from Joomla! x.y to Joomla (x+1).0 or (x+1).1. The reason is that we are developers, not psychics. We cannot possibly predict how future Joomla! versions in the same major version, let alone yet another major version, will evolve. We cannot possibly predict how PHP will evolve. You will have to do upgrades in the next major version's .0 or .1 minor version, then upgrade to the last minor version of that major release series, then repeat this process until you reach the latest major and minor version of Joomla! published.

Yes, it's a lot of work. It's worth considering what would be best: doing the updates within the one year of the new .0 / .1 minor versions when there's full support for updates, doing the staggered updates as I described, or starting over? The answer is NOT the same for every site. I've seen sites where only one of these three strategies made financial sense. Based on some informal data I've collected, more than half of all sites benefit from the first strategy, on a third of the sites the second strategy makes more sense (especially those with tons of extensions), and the rest are so rickety it makes sense to start over just because it's a good opportunity to finally fix past mistakes.

But I digress.

The other alternative is, of course:

• Export your backups profiles from the Joomla! 3 site
• Uninstall Akeeba Backup
• Perform the upgrade from Joomla! 3 to 4 to 5.
• Install Akeeba Backup 9
• Import the backup profiles

However, in this case, you lose your backup history.