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Akeeba Backup for Joomla! 4.2.1 Stable

Released on: 2015-06-04 09:54 CDT

Release highlights

Joomla! 3.3 and 3.4 only. We discontinued Joomla! 2.5 support in January 2015 as previously announced.

Desktop notifications: You will receive notifications on your desktop when the backup starts, issues a warning / error or finishes successfully. Please note that this feature requires a compatible browser. At the time of this writing Chrome, Firefox and Safari support desktop notifications.

UTF8MB4 (UTF-8 multibyte) support in restoration scripts: Supports databases able to display quad byte UTF-8 characters such as Emoji and the less common Traditional Chinese glyphs.

Bug fixes: There is a really important one affecting your ability to restore a backup if your old database password contains double quotes. Some minor issues and enhancements regarding remote storage services are also included.

Alternatives to obsolete features removed in 4.2.0

Since Akeeba Backup 4.2.0 the features deprecated since 4.0.0 have been removed. Below you can find alternatives if you miss the functionality and need an equivalent solution.

Post-setup page. All messages are now handled through Joomla!'s Post-Installation Messages component. This change first appeared in Akeeba Backup 4.0 when installed on Joomla! 3.2 and later. Now this is now the only way to review the post-installation messages.

Site Transfer Wizard. The wizard didn't make site transfers possible, it only helped you set up the backup profile. You can still use the DirectFTP and DirectSFTP archiver engine to the same effect – after all, that's the only thing the wizard did for you, enable these archiver engines. However we recommend using regular JPA or ZIP backup archives with the Upload to FTP and Upload to SFTP post-processing engines along with the Upload Kickstart option. This new method is much more stable and far less likely to fail midway through the site transfer.

System Restore Point and Extension Filters. These two features were removed for the same reason: since Joomla! 1.6 it is no longer feasible to backup and restore, or even exclude, a single extension of your site. Joomla!'s ACL system means that everything in it (articles, categories, extensions and even third party items) are linked together through the #__assets table. On top of that, the Tags and Content Versioning features added in Joomla! 3.1 and 3.2 respectively made everything also depend on the UCM set of tables. Due to the way these tables are constructed it's impossible to make a complete backup of an extension's state without also backing up the entire system states. This makes the System Restore Points either incomplete backups (they were, indeed) or would make their restoration potentially kill your site (we didn't go that way for obvious reasons). Furthermore, removing a single extension would either leave behind orphan records or create holes in the tables, both options leading to database inconsistencies which could make your site fail to work correctly. For these reasons we removed both features and have to note that no, they DID NOT work properly in Joomla! 1.6, 1.7, 2.5, 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 and 3.4; no, they cannot be fixed (what do you think we were trying to do the last four years?); and no, they are not coming back exactly because they DO NOT work and CAN NOT be made to work. There is no alternative. We recommend simply taking full backups of your site before any major change such as upgrading to a new major version of an extension.

Lite Mode. This feature was developed back when featurephones with limited web browsers were the norm. In the eight years which have elapsed since that time smartphones with full featured browsers became the norm, Joomla! became responsive and other mobile devices with full features web browsers (tablets, netbooks / mini-laptops such as the 2015 MacBook, two-in-ones such as Microsoft Surface Pro etc) have emerged. For this reason the easiest, most stable and outright convenient way to back up your site while on the move is logging in to the backend of your Joomla! 3 site from your mobile device and use Akeeba Backup normally. Our interface is responsive and touch-optimised since mid-2012!

Changelog

Bug fixes

  • [HIGH] Restoration might be impossible if your database passwords contains a double quote character
  • [LOW] Some installations didn't have the correct embedded installer selected. Now forcing the correct default if an invalid value is detected.
  • [LOW] White page when the ak_stats database table is broken
  • [MEDIUM] Dropbox and iDriveSync: could not upload under PHP 5.6 and some versions of PHP 5.5
  • [MEDIUM] OneDrive upload could fail in CLI CRON jobs if the upload of all parts takes more than 3600 seconds
  • [MEDIUM] Possible crash when the legacy MySQL driver is not available
  • [MEDIUM] Reupload from Manage Backups failed when the post-processing engine is configured to use chunked uploads

New features

  • Desktop notifications for backup start, finish, warning and error on compatible browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox)
  • UTF8MB4 (UTF-8 multibyte) support in restoration scripts, allows you to correctly restore content using multibyte Unicode characters (Emoji, Traditional Chinese, etc)
  • You can create new backup profiles from the Configuration page using the Save & New button
  • You can set the backup profile name directly from the Configuration page

Miscellaneous changes

  • OneDrive: refresh the tokens if they expire in the middle of an upload
  • The logs and log directories at the site's root are forcibly excluded if present (some developers hardcode them)
  • Updated Import from S3 to use the official Amazon AWS SDK for PHP

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