Akeeba Backup — even the Core version — already is a site migration and duplication software.
As a matter of fact, Akeeba Backup was originally developed exactly because I needed an easy, reliable way to move my sites from local development to staging, staging to live and live back to development. It just so happens that when you migrate a site back onto itself that's called a backup. People are more likely to look for a backup solution than a site migration solution even though they are actually the same thing. That's why it's called Akeeba Backup.
> i have seen that akeeba backup pro is offering a migration solution.
The Pro version has a UI to let you copy the backup archive between servers but it does NOT make migration possible; migration is possible even with the Core version. There's a video tutorial labelled “Restore on any server”. The hint is the name. Follow it through. As you can see, you just copy the backup archive file(s) and kickstart.php to a server different than the one you backed up from and you can restore the backup there. Therefore, you are creating a clone of the site!
> is it posible to use akeeba to maintain an offline website as a prepared backup for the main website ? (website duplicate)
Absolutely! We are doing this ourselves. I restore a backup of our site on my computer every day for development purposes. It's an exact replica of the live site. How do I do this? I just restore the nightly full site backup on my computer, automatically with Akeeba UNiTE :)
> is it possible to automate this with no manual download updload of backup archives ?
Yes, it is. If you are a Professional subscriber to any of our backup products you have access to Akeeba UNiTE. This is a unattended backup restoration tool.
If the backup is still on your server or on Amazon S3 it can also download it for you. If you are storing the backup on a different remote storage solution you have to provide your own solution for downloading the backup archive. There are command line tools for retrieving files from SFTP, FTP, WebDAV, Azure etc. As a matter of fact, I am using s3cmd to download the latest full site backup archive on my computer from Amazon S3 and then have UNiTE restore it on my computer. It's all in a simple shell script which I automate with CRON.
When developing Akeeba Backup and its constellation of tools I follow the UNIX approach. I create small, task-oriented tools you can chain together to create an automation I could not have possibly thought of. I know there are people who are using Akeeba Backup, Akeeba Remote CLI and Akeeba UNiTE with Ansible playbooks to take a backup, provision a server, transfer the backup and restore it. That's one way to make a dev site in a consistent manner without human intervention! I had not thought of that use case when I was creating the tools but since they are task-oriented they were a natural fit for an automation tool like Ansible.
Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos
Lead Developer and Director
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