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Please download and install Akeeba Backup 3.3.1 which solves this issue with sites hosted on servers running PHP 5.2.

Hi Rowby,

Akeeba Backup 3.3.1 was released just a few hours ago. There are quite a few serious reasons why you weren't notified of the update.

For starters, we are using a CDN to host our update information data. While the master repository was updated 3 minutes after the new version was published on the site, updating the edge nodes (the dozens of servers which disseminate this content) may take a few minutes to a few hours.

Then, Akeeba Backup's Live Update caches update information for 6 hours. This is done in order to not having to contact our update servers every time you request any single AkeebaBackup.com page. Why? First, doing one request per page load would -even under the most ideal of conditions- slow down your site considerably, adding at least a half second delay before seeing Akeeba Backup's control panel page, every time you tried to access it. Second, given the huge installation base, this volume of requests would either bring our server down (as happened when the CDN was accidentally switched off two months ago) or cause so much traffic to the CDN that it would cost a fortune just to keep running this feature (bandwidth costs a lot of money). So the 6 hour delay behind new release notifications was deemed the best compromise approach.

Of course, after the cache expires (6 hours after the last check), the new release notification will show up in all Akeeba Backup installations which support our Live Update system.

Invariably, being a best compromise, the caching settings I chose are not optimal for any and all conditions. When an emergency bugfix release is deployed you will most likely not get an instant notification, unless your night coincides or ends at the time I push out the new release. In order to work around this issue, we provide the following means:
1- Our Twitter account, @akeebabackup, tweets notifications of new software releases
2- We have an RSS feed in our news page which always contains release announcements of our latest releases
3- Our front page has an "Email me" module. You can enter your email address and will be sent a copy of our releases announcements to your email, courtesy of FeedBurner.

I think that by offering a variety of push and pull notification methods it's unlikely that you will not somehow be notified about a new release within at most 12 hours after its release.

Good idea about the Twitter account! I should probably redesign the control panel page a bit, using headers instead of sliders.

Please note that an "AJAX error" means absolutely nothing without looking at the log. It only means "something happened and the backup crashed". While 3.3.1 does solve the compatibility issue with PHP 5.2, I guess that you have a completely different backup issue. Start by following these troubleshooting instructions and, if this doesn't work, please start a new thread, complete with a ZIP file with your log file. Otherwise, I can not really help you.