Support

I will not give you a refund on the basis that you refused to follow troubleshooting instructions. You may want to read again the Terms of Service you unreservedly and explicitly agreed to when subscribing. Take a look under the Support Policy. There are three bullet point lists. Check the fourth item in the third list and you'll see why I closed your ticket as per our Terms of Service.

You can follow my instructions, and I can help you solve your issue.

Or, you can keep telling me you know better than me, in which case your ticket remains closed with the liability lying on the customer (that's you), as per the Terms of Service.

I will just remind you that I am a systems administrator and software developer who's been publishing software for Joomla for 20 years, and has written large parts of Joomla that you use every day. I have seen this problem many times, and I know exactly what it is. I would think that maybe I am vastly more qualified than you to assess the root cause of your issue and help you fix it, regardless of your unsubstantiated and quite frankly completely irrelevant opinion.

Why all the lies?

Your earliest subscription was in October 2023 and you've been taking two month breaks every time your subscription expires. It would be beyond a stretch of the imagination to call that a decade. I do have access to your ticket history. Your issues are all five minute fixes which you expand into veritable sagas by being difficult. I am trying to help you, but you refuse to be helped. On top of that, you have the gall to threaten me with… I am sorry, you threatened me in writing to commit wire fraud. Not the wisest of choices. Moreover, I know you are lying about following instructions. Sigh. Let's go over this for one final time.

The package you are failing to install has been downloaded and installed several thousands of times since it was released about three days ago. I have personally installed this software on my own sites. Before the package it was released I installed it on my testing Joomla 5.4 and 6.1 sites. After the package was released I installed on all of my sites, including this very site. This applies to all of the software I've released and have ever released. This is part of my release process. If something breaks, it will first break on my sites, before y'all have access to it.

More to the point, the error message you get is this, as per your own ticket (I am picking the one from Admin Tools because it's marginally clearer, since you didn't bother to copy the whole error message when updating Akeeba Backup):

Joomla\Filesystem\File::copy([ROOT]/tmp/install_69eb6b13d0a4b/install_69eb6b144afca/.htaccess, [ROOT]/plugins/console/admintools/.htaccess

This error message comes from Joomla, not our software. It gives us a lot of useful information, which I did take into account before answering you the first time.

Joomla has already extracted the Admin Tools package extension (pkg_admintools*.zip) in the temporary directory tmp/install_69eb6b13d0a4b under your site's root. It has further extracted the included system plugin (plg_console_admintools) ZIP package contained therein into the install_69eb6b144afca subdirectory of the aforementioned directory. As a result, this is not a packaging issue.

We can further establish that this file is, indeed, included in the package by downloading and extracting the package on any computer, and then extracting the plg_console_admintools.zip file contained therein. We indeed see that this file is included in the ZIP file with a compressed size of 104 bytes, extracted size of 166 bytes, CRC32 A1D1EFF0 and timestamp 25 October 2024 16:08 EEST. Which is to say that the one thing under my control –including this file in the distributed package– has been done correctly as it's been done for well over a decade in our software in general. Which is to say that this file has existed and been included in our package since before you were even a subscriber – which, I remind you, is since October 2023, not ten years ago.

The error message explicitly says that Joomla itself failed to copy the .htaccess file from that temporary directory into its final installation path of plugins/console/admintools/.htaccess under your site's root.

This file also happens to be the first file in the XML manifest of the first plugin listed in the package XML manifest, i.e. the first file Joomla tries to copy after Joomla has finished installing the Admin Tools component (the component is listed before the plugins in the package manifest, therefore gets installed first). To wit, this is the relevant <files> section of the package's XML manifest:

<files>
<file type="component" id="com_admintools">com_admintools-pro.zip</file>
<file type="plugin" group="console" id="admintools">plg_console_admintools.zip</file>
<file type="plugin" group="system" id="admintools">plg_system_admintools.zip</file>
<file type="plugin" group="actionlog" id="admintools">plg_actionlog_admintools.zip</file>
<file type="plugin" group="task" id="admintools">plg_task_admintools.zip</file>
</files>

Why would Joomla suddenly be unable to copy a file that's been shipped with our packages for years? If you had actually spent 5 minutes to read this documentation page I asked you to read, you'd know. Remember I told you to read the "File ownership (Previously: Enable FTP)" section which has the following to say:

Some shared servers run PHP as an Apache module. As a result PHP runs under the same user as Apache which is a different user than the one your user account is owned and the one used when uploading files via FTP / SFTP. As a result you end up with mixed ownership of your files, making it often impossible to install or update extensions.

Old Joomla versions (1.x, 2.x and 3.x) included a Global Configuration feature called “Enable FTP”. This feature would make Joomla go through FTP to write to any file, therefore all your files would be owned by the same user, your hosting account's user. However, this was a security issue since Joomla needed to store your FTP password in the clear. In most cases that was also the hosting control panel password. In other words, any security mishap which would divulge Joomla's configuration to an unauthorised user — even a simple misconfiguration of your site's permissions — could cause major problems to your site. This feature has, therefore, been removed from Joomla 4.0 onwards.

If you find yourself on such a host it's a good time to move to a different, better set up host.

To give you a better idea, the PHP developers themselves have said that the PHP Apache module should not be used for shared hosting scenarios. It's something only really meant to be used for single site servers with the assumption that Apache is correctly configured for this use case. Solutions for PHP running as a different user for each site of a shared hosting server have existed since the early 00's. If your host has still not gotten wind of these problems and their respective solutions over a course of at least two decades they are probably unqualified to host any site, hence the recommendation to move to a different host.

If you had followed the instructions you'd have already resolved your issue and we would not be here.

Consider this your final warning. I am happy to help, but you have to work with me, not against me. 

Since you keep threatening to commit wire fraud, co ti ue lying, and refuse to follow simple instructions I am terminating your account without a refund and banning you for life as per our ToS.

Client sent the following email using our contact form on 26/04/2026 01:13 EEST

Great, and I will immediately inform all my business partners of your antisocial and incompetent behaviour and urge them not to make any further payments to you. I already have screenshots of all the correspondence. Ridiculous!!

Since you keep threatening to commit wire fraud, co ti ue lying, and refuse to follow simple instructions I am terminating your account without a refund and banning you for life as per our ToS.

We replied the following on 26/04/2026 at 12:40 EEST

Hello Oliver,

I made repeated attempts to help you. I kept responding with more professionalism and kindness than your overt aggression and maliciousness warranted. I gave you a very detailed technical analysis. I gave you actionable instructions. You refused to use any of that. You refused to provide any technical arguments. You kept on lying, bullying, and threatening. And now you are extorting me. You have an interesting way of doing business. There is a word for people like you, but it's too pedestrian to include in (what should have been) business communication.

You claimed that both your developer and your host do not understand how to check and potentially change the ownership and permissions of specific directories and files I explicitly mentioned in my reply to you. I am not sure if you understand how overt a lie this is. It's like saying "my world-class chef does not understand your instruction to sautee the onion". You basically accused them of being utterly incompetent. If you are so dead set on contacting them, how about I contact them myself with a link to your now public ticket so they can see for themselves how you drag their names though the mud? I am pretty sure they will be thrilled to find out you make them look like idiots when you either haven't contacted them, or contacted them with you incoherent babbling they of course cannot act on since nothing you say ever makes any sense whatsoever.

If you were not so focused on being malicious and belligerent you'd have realised that my previous response told you exactly how you can prove yourself wrong. You have a specific version of our software installed, one that you did manage to install yourself in the past, on the same site. As I told you, that version does contain the .htaccess file Joomla now fails to copy on update. Therefore, trying to install it would also try to copy the same file to the same location on your site and Joomla would still fail. Joomla failing to install the version from the past you had already successfully installed in the past proves beyond any shred of doubt that the problem is NOT with the packaging of the extension but the server itself.

Furthermore, if you had actually talked to a developer and gave them my complete responses instead of lying about all of it, they would have told you that the simplest way to deal with ownership and permissions issues is to remove the files and folders of the currently installed version, then install the extension twice in a row without uninstalling it before or in between to force Joomla to copy all files afresh. To be very explicit about what you need to remove, it's the following directories (some of them MAY not be present on your site, depending on which version of the software you had previously installed):

    administrator/components/com_akeebabackup 
    components/com_akeebabackup
    api/components/com_akeebabackup
    plugins/actionlog/akeebabackup
    plugins/console/akeebabackup
    plugins/pagecache/akeebabackup
    plugins/quickicon/akeebabackup
    plugins/system/akwarn
    plugins/system/backuponupdate
    plugins/task/akeebabackup
    plugins/webservices/akeebabackup
    administrator/components/com_admintools
    components/com_admintools
    api/components/com_admintools
    plugins/console/admintools
    plugins/system/admintools
    plugins/actionlog/admintools
    plugins/task/admintools

Before doing that, keep a copy of administrator/components/com_akeebabackup/serverkey.php and restore it upon installing Akeeba Backup and before you try to access it from Components, Akeeba Backup in your site's backend.

This is WAY more than you deserve to be given in terms of support, especially given the fact that you have been acting like a complete and utter jerk to me through and through.

I am going to be publishing this email exchange on your now public ticket. Please make sure to point your business partners to that ticket so they can see exactly what kind of person they are dealing with.

As for who I am and how I help other people and the Joomla community in general, I have more than two decades of public interactions and software to show for it. I am not worried. If someone decides to side with the bully and stop being a subscriber as a result, that's a positive thing for me; they are bullies themselves, the exact kind of people I do not want as clients.