Support

I am not sure which username and password you are talking about. If you are talking about the AkeebaBackup.com username/password required to fetch updates, it's optional. Akeeba Backup can detect the update availability without the username/password pair but can't automatically download the update. In this case, you can simply download the update manually and install it using the Joomla! installer. Do note that even if you don't enter your AkeebaBackup.com username/password Akeeba Backup Professional will work without a problem. There is no "phone home" or "license check" in the code. The only reason you have to enter your AkeebaBackup.com credentials is that we need a way to validate that you really have the right to download the updates, otherwise it would be as if we were giving away the Professional release for free.

Yeap, it's a balance, as you said. I have a mid-term plan of implementing something like "API keys", i.e. a string which will uniquely identify you on our system for download purposes, but can't be used to login to AkeebaBackup.com. Of course, this isn't something Joomla! was designed to do, so I'll have to improvise (again) :)