I had originally thought about writing this post as a comparison of the various backup solutions available for Joomla, and while there are plenty of Joomla backup solutions out there, over the last few months Ive been using Akeeba Backup and like it so much I can't really recommend it enough.

One of the issues that I have with backing up the Joomlabamboo site is that because it's such a large site it often proves problematic when it comes to easily downloading and storing the backup zips. As you probably know the backups rarely get touched and in Australia bandwidth and download quotas are prized posessions, so to download almost a gig per day just for a backup is foolhardy to say the least ... Enter Akeeba and the cloud.

The pro version of Akeeba has the ability to take your backup and split it up into tiny little bits and then send it across to the incredibly cheap Amazon S3 storage service. The cost is somewhere in the order of 15 cents a gig which is obviously so affordable you hardly have any reason not to use it.

Akeeba also have some indepth tutorials explaining how to set up the cloud service and while I did have a few misfires when I was first setting the system up, creating a new off server backup is now almost completely effortless. There are also some instructions on creating a cron to automate the process as well which takes the entire process out of your hands so you can have regular daily backups of you or your clients site without even having to think about it.

The only downside I would say about the component is that the user interface takes a little getting use to and I think the icons could probably use a little freshen up, but that's really just personal visual stuff and it's not a huge issue from a usability point of view.

Akeeba Backup Core - the free version is a great Joomla component but to get the cloud backup function you need to get Akeeba Backup Proefessional - the subscription-based GPL version which is only 30 Euro. For me thats cheap when you consider the piece of mind when you consider how effortless it is. As far as I know thats the only Joomla extension that backs up to the cloud but I'd be happy to hear about any others in the comments.

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