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To be perfectly clear, Akeeba Backup is a full site backup and restoration tool. As noted in our documentation, restoring a backup made with Akeeba Backup will overwrite your existing site and make it an identical copy of the source site.

This means you cannot restore a Joomla 3 site on top of a Joomla 4 site and magically have it upgrade. This is not how any of that works. This is actually impossible in Joomla. You need to UPGRADE your site to Joomla 4, then transfer it with Akeeba Backup.

We will be working on your Joomla 3 site.

Take a backup.

Upgrade all third party extensions: packages, components, plugins, modules, and templates.

Make sure everything works. If not, contact the offending extension's developer and ask them for help.

Take a backup.

Upgrade to the latest Joomla 3.10 release. You cannot upgrade to Joomla 4 if you are not already on the latest Joomla 3.10 release.

Make sure everything works. If not, contact the offending extension's developer and ask them for help. Some extensions may no longer be supported, mind you.

Take a backup.

Make sure you are using PHP 7.2, 7.3, 7.4 or 8.0 (recommended: 8.0). If not, upgrade your PHP version, make sure your site is working (if not, ask the offending extension's developer for support) and take a new backup.

Go to Components, Joomla Update, Options and set the Update Channel to “Joomla Next”. Click on Save & Close.

You now see an upgrade available to Joomla 4. Try to install it.

You will get a (mostly useless) report about extensions compatibility. This report is useless because it doesn't work correctly. For example, it reports the plugins included with our extension packages as incompatible even though the package itself (therefore all its included extensions, including the plugins!) is reported as compatible. Check with the developers of all listed extensions. All of our extensions which are compatible with Joomla 3.10 are also compatible with Joomla 4.

You may find legitimately incompatible extensions and/or extensions no longer developed or supported. You will have to remove them.

Upgrade to Joomla 4.

Take a backup of your site.

Your site will be mostly broken. At the very least, you will need a new template. Some extensions will not work correctly or at all, plus you may have extensions you had to remove. You will need to work on your site to make it work and look the way you need it to. Take backups in the intermediate steps of development. This process may take anywhere from half a day for simple sites to several weeks for complex sites which used a lot of extensions which are no longer available on Joomla 4 and beyond.

Take a backup of your upgraded Joomla 4 site.

Copy the backup file(s) and kickstart.php to your new server.

Run kickstart.php and proceed extracting the backup and restoring the site. You will need to know the database connection information.

You now have a new site on a new server. Make sure everything works and then you can switch over DNS to the new server.