Due to changes in the packaging format and / or issues in the updater, you cannot update automatically from Akeeba Backup for WordPress versions 1.0 through 1.8.2 (inclusive) to version 1.9.0 and beyond. You will have to do that manually.
Heads up! You must NOT uninstall or deactivate the plugin before the update. Doing so may result in loss of your backup settings and / or your backup archives. Instead, here's what to do:
akeebabackupwp.
akeebabackupwp folder into your site's
wp-content/plugins/akeebabackupwp
folder, overwriting your existing files, using FTP or SFTP.
Please note that the name of the folder on your site may be different than akeebabackupwp,
e.g. akeebabackupwpcore, akeebabackupwp (1) or something similar. It depends on how
you installed the plugin.
You will only need to do this once, upgrading to version 1.9 or later for the first time.
Improved display of large log files. Some really big log files could crash the browser or cause a server timeout, preventing you from being able to download the log file. Now you have to explicitly allow the display of these large logs and when you do they are rendered using more efficient plain text display.
Improved tooltip display. Tooltips in the Configuration page are no longer static. If you want to make them static click on the label: the tooltip will remain open so you can use it as a reference for changing the respective configuration field. Please note that you can no longer copy text from tooltips as a result of this change.
We also fixed two obscure bugs regarding the use of a dollar sign followed by open curly brace in database passwords (due to a nearly undocumented PHP feature) and compatibility with newer servers where the get_magic_quotes_runtime function is correctly not available. We also noticed that many servers out there have operating system kernel core dumps in the public_html directory and you were backing them up. That's a waste of space so we now exclude all core dump files (named similar to core.1234) automatically. This will cause the backup size to decrease, substantially in many cases. Please don't report this to us as a bug, it's a bug in your server setup: these core dump files should never be there in the first place! Tell your host.
The following features were originally introduced in the 1.8.x releases.
Automatic detection and working around of temporary data load failure. Some servers remove Akeeba Backup's / Solo's "memory" files, causing the backup to fail. Now Akeeba Backup and Akeeba Solo Solo detect this error condition and automatically work around that, using the much slower but safer database storage instead.
Better workarounds for PHP opcode caches during and after backup extraction and site restoration.
Direct download link to Akeeba Kickstart in the Manage Backups page for easier manual restoration.
Easier discoverability of backup scheduling with links shown after the Configuration Wizard has completed and a toolbar button in the Configuration page.
Download log button in ALICE for easier filing of tickets.
Better workarounds for browsers' password auto-fill, making sure that the ANGIE and JPS password fields are not magically filled in by your browser with the wrong password.
Akeeba Solo and Akeeba Backup for WordPress 1.9 are compatible with PHP 5.3.04 and later versions, including 5.4, 5.5, 5.6 and the newest version of PHP, 7.0. We'd like to remind you that most third party software which can be backed up by our software do not support PHP 7 yet. As a result we can't guarantee a trouble-free restoration or tha the restored site will work on PHP 7 as this depends entirely on the software powering your site.
Note: there is no such thing as PHP 6. PHP versions jumped from 5.6 to 7.0. Why? Well, it's a long story. TL;DR: It doesn't have to make sense, just accept it.