Support

Hi Roland,

This feature is not implemented for practical reasons. In order to implement that feature, we'd have to accept the initial directory being an inexistent path. Then we'd have to start trying from the root folder upwards, creating directories as we go. And now the practical problems:
1. What if instead of private_ftp/mysite/[DATE] you mistakenly typed public_html/mysite/[DATE] ? What would happen is that the mysite directory and the date-based directory would be created in public_html, made available through the web and probably indexed by search engines. That would have made you a sitting duck. Instead, without the proposed feature, having public_html/mysite instead of private_ftp/mysite would cause an error, as the "mysite" directory would not be present in public_html.
2. The Test FTP Connection would be unreliable. If we kept on checking the existence of the initial directory, we'd end up creating a new directory every time you pressed that button. Otherwise, we'd have to not check for the initial directory, causing potential issues at backup time.

Regarding your concerns, any half-decent FTP client can sort the filenames alphabetically. Given the default timestamps in the file names (in the form YYYYMMDD-HHMMSS, eg 20110820-001501), sorting alphabetically allow you to easily locate the archives you need by date and download/delete them.

Therefore, since the practical issues from implementing that feature are greater than those of not implementing it, I decided to leave it out.

I thought about that -hence the delayed reply- and decided against it. The FTP code is used in various other places, including the Site Transfer Wizard. Adding an ad-hoc option to the FTP engine would create many instances of deep magic code in the rest of the component. Yes, it would work, but it would add a level of unmaintainability and inflexibility to the code that really bugs me. So, until I find a good way to work around the architectural and functional challenges, I am not going to implement that feature.

Each post-processing engine is two files: one PHP file with the actual code and one INI file defining the settings. Just take a look inside administrator/components/com_akeeba/akeeba/plugins/engine/proc and look at ftp.ini and ftp.php. I think it will be very easy to understand what you need to do ;)

If you get stuck, post back. I'm here to help :)