Support

Hi!

It seems that the configuration.php file wasn't written to disk during the last step of Akeeba Backup Installer's restoration procedure, causing this issue.

The easiest workaround is to repeat the restoration process. Go through the usual restoration process and take a look at the last page of Akeeba Backup Installer. If it tells you that the configuration.php file wasn't written to disk, it presents you a gray text area with the contents of the configuration.php that it was unable to write. In this case, download your configuration.php file, edit it with a plain text editor (depending on your Operating System, good candidates include Notepad, GEdit, Fraise) and replace its contents with the contents of the gray box. Then, upload the configuration.php file back to your site's root, go back to Kickstart and click on Clean Up.

If that didn't work, you will have to do some manual editing. Edit your site's configuration.php file. Your configuration.php consists of several lines. Each one is in the following form:

var $key = "value";

The key is the name of the configuration variable and value (inside double quotes!) is the value of the variable. Below is a list of the configuration variables which have to be modified to get up on-line:

dbtype is the database driver Joomla! will use. It can be either mysql or mysqli (notice the extra i in the end). If unsure, your best bet is mysql.

host is the database host name, usually localhost. If that doesn't work, try 127.0.0.1. If that still doesn't work, ask your host.

user is the database user name, assigned from your host company

password is - obviously - the database password, assigned from your host company

db is the database's name, assigned from your host company

dbprefix is the database table name prefix; on most Joomla! 1.5/1.6 sites it is jos_. You can find it out by looking at your database using phpMyAdmin and seeing what is the common part all table names begin with. Important: bak_ are backup copies of your table and should NEVER be used as your site's prefix.

live_site (this is an optional setting) Normally this is an empty string. If, however, your Joomla! site's front page looks as if all images and CSS files are not loading, you have to modify it and enter your site's base URL. For example, if the new site is located in http://www.example.com/mysite/, you have to locate the line starting with var $live_site and change it to become:

var $live_site = "http://www.example.com/mysite";

Important: Do NOT include the trailing slash.

That's all! You're good to go.

If you get stuck, please do not hesitate to post back so that I can further assist you.

Hi!

The default configuration (when you install the Akeeba Backup component) is to not exclude such crucial files and information from your site. Unless you intentionally used the "Files and Directories Exclusion" and "Database Tables Exclusion" to exclude information from your site, nothing was excluded except the contents of your temporary, log and cache folders, i.e. the folders which contain temporary information that doesn't make any sense to backup in the first place.

That said, your issue does not seem to have anything to do with excluded data. The restoration script (Akeeba Backup Installer) which is automatically included in every Akeeba Backup archive is able to cope with missing configuration.php files. In fact, it generates a brand new configuration.php file at the end of the restoration process and attempts to write it to your site's root, overwriting any existing file under the same name. There are three known issues with that:
1. Some older versions of Akeeba Backup Installer, shipped with early versions of Akeeba Backup in the 3.1.x range, had a bug which prevented some of the information to be updated in the configuration.php file. This doesn't seem to be the case here, as you have a more recent version. Side note: please upgrade to 3.3.1 stable, released today.
2. If you take too long to proceed to the final two pages, your PHP session might expire and the database information is "forgotten" by the script. Unfortunately, there is no way to throw an error in this case. The end result is that the database connection information written in the configuration.php file is blank, resulting in an error when trying to access the site. If you suspect that this is the case, please do not wait more than 5 minutes after the database restoration is over until you proceed to the next page or proceeding from the site setup to the final page of the restoration script.
3. If the configuration.php file is not writable, Akeeba Backup Installer warns you that it can not write to the file and displays the proposed content of the file in its final page. It also displays a prominent modal dialog to let you know of this fact. It is then your responsibility to manually edit that file in order to update it with the contents displayed in Akeeba Backup Installer's interface, as I said in my previous post.

I hope that makes sense. If you get stuck somewhere, feel free to post back!