Black Hills Web Works

WordPress Websites for Churches, Nonprofits, and Small Businesses

How to restore or move a Joomla website using Akeeba Backup

By · Published on
32 Comments

Joomla!Akeeba Backup is one of, if not THE, absolute must-have components for a Joomla website. Not only is it a vital part of your website security strategy in the event that you need to quickly restore a hacked or otherwise broken website, it’s useful for more utilitarian purposes such as moving a Joomla website from one server to another. Many people, myself included, start building a Joomla website on their local machine and then towards the end of development move the website to a website hosting provider.

Akeeba Backup works, and works very well, but using it can be confusing at times. The documentation available on their website is incredibly thorough, and if you run into a problem using Akeeba the answer you’re looking for is in there. Somewhere. And that’s the problem in today’s world – we often don’t want to read through that much documentation, even if it is good for us.

One of the more confusing parts of the process is restoring a site from the archive file that Akeeba creates for you, though once you grasp the basic concept the pieces tend to fall into place and it almost becomes second nature. And that’s the goal for this blog post: keep it short, sweet, and simple as possible.

These are the fundamental steps involved, and they should apply to the majority of situations, especially if you’re using a good hosting provider such as Rochen, the undisputed kings of hosting, IMO. If you’re not, or your situation is unique for some other reason, you can post your question here, but I may end up referring you to the Akeeba documentation or to their support forums.

Start with your archive file

The main point of Akeeba, really, is to create an archive (compressed) file that contains your entire website, its database, and the Joomla software. With this file in hand, you can re-create your website wherever you need to, within reason. So install Akeeba, click “Backup Now,” then click on “Administer Backup Files.” Find the file you just made, which should be at the top of the list, click on the file name in the “Manage & Download” column on the far right, and click “OK” when it asks if you want to continue. (If that warning message about downloading through your browser bothers you, fire up Filezilla and FTP the archive file to your computer instead.)

Move the file to its new home

If the website’s new home is an Internet server, it will more than likely be the “root” directory (public_html, www, or similar) or a subdomain directory. If it’s on your local machine and you’re using XAMMP, it’s going to go into XAMPP ? htdocs ? [folder name].

Don’t forget to bring kickstart.php

kickstart.php is a small file that, well, kickstarts the Joomla installer into motion, more or less. You can download the latest version of kickstart from Akeeba on this page. After downloading, extract the file and move or FTP kickstart.php into the same directory that your archive file is in.

NOTE: Don’t leave these two files in this directory on a live web server. Either finish the process now, or don’t put the files there in the first place.

Create a database

If you’re using XAMPP on a local machine, creating the database happens during the install process, at least in my experience.

If you’re on a web host, go to your cPanel (or otherwise) and create a MySQL database, a database user, add the user to the database with full privileges, and make a note of the database name, user name, and user password.

Unpack and install

Using a web browser, navigate to wherever the archive file and kickstart.php are waiting. On your local machine, that should be localhost/[folder name]. On the web, type in the URL of the website-to-be. Either way you should then see a directory listing that will include your archive file and kickstart.php. Click on kickstart.php and the installation begins. If you get an error message right away, you may find this documentation to be helpful.

Follow the instructions

From here on out, the installation is pretty straightforward, and is similar to the first time you installed Joomla, assuming you did install Joomla the “real” way and didn’t use a one-step installation like Fantastico. I say “similar” because Nicholas decided at some point to only use his version of the Joomla installer. Hey, it’s his software, so why not? For the official Akeeba documentation for this part, check out this page. Otherwise, here are some key steps to watch out for:

  1. Click the big green “Start” button and it starts extracting.
  2. When it’s finished extracting, click the big green “Run the installer” button, which should open a new browser tab (or window).
  3. If Server Setup Check looks okay, click “Next” in the upper-right corner. (Don’t worry if “Display Errors” is in red.)
  4. Akeeba may ask you if you want to clear the database fields. You’ll have to enter the correct information anyway, so it’s your choice.
  5. On your local machine, the database host name is usually “localhost”, user name is “root”, password can be left blank, and database name should be something relevant to the website. On a web host, the database host name is still probably “localhost”, but username, password, and database name need to be what you jotted down in the “Create a database” step.
  6. Under advanced options, do yourself a big security favor and change the default “jos_” database prefix to something – anything – else. Just use lowercase letters and some numbers, but no symbols. Ten or twelve random characters starting with a letter should do it.
  7. Click “Next” and wait for “Restoration” to finish.
  8. On the Site Info screen, you can pretty much leave everything as is, except make sure that User Name under Super Administrator Settings is the username you are able to login with.
  9. Almost finished: go back to the other tab that says “Akeeba Kickstart 3.x” and click on the big green “Clean Up” button.
  10. If you previously had your Administrator directory password-protected and you’ve just moved to a new server or your local machine, you may need to delete the .htaccess file from that directory before you can access the back end of your site.
UPDATE: If after you restore or migrate your site you are only able to access your home page and you get a 404 error for any other page on your site, check your primary .htaccess file. Akeeba may have renamed it htaccess.txt, and if you have “Use Apache mod_rewrite” turned on you need to rename that file to .htaccess

Final thoughts

If you just installed your website on a live web host, you still have some security work to do, like making sure your chmod settings are correct – 755 for directories, 644 for files. Filezilla works great for this step.

I’ll take this opportunity also to make a plug for Akeeba Backup Professional. It has some definite advantages over the Core version, such as making automatic backups to Amazon S3 using a Cron job, but that’s a topic for a future blog post.

Comments

  2. And now i got a different error. Call to undefined function curl_init() in C:wampwwwmodulesmod_jgoogleadsenseelementshelper.php on line 9

    this is si tedious. why cant they just make a back up to localhost button?

  3. I need help. On 
    Site Info page, when I click Next, I got following error: ”
    You don’t have permission to access /installation/index.php on this server.”

    • Without more information I’m thinking that sounds like an issue with your server host and not Akeeba.

      I did a Google search and found this article in the Akeeba documentation: https://www.akeebabackup.com/documentation/troubleshooter/abiissues.html#abisession

      Specifically from that article, I would try this: “Your first approach should be asking your host to fix the PHP
      session save path to something which is writable by your hosting
      account. This is a very common misconfiguration issue on Plesk-based
      hosts.”

      As a follow-up, which version of Joomla are you using? Who are you using for a host?

      Hopefully that helps…
      John

  4. Specifically from that article, I would try this: “Your first approach should be asking your host to fix the PHP
    session save path to something which is writable by your hosting
    account. This is a very common misconfiguration issue on Plesk-based
    hosts.”

  5. Thanks for clear explanation. However I need little help to complete restoration.

    I am trying to restore live site backup to WAMP localhost. All steps in process of backing up live site to bringing it up on localhost with Kickstart script went smoothly. But on last step after removing installation folder and redirecting to home page I get “Problem loading page”.

    I am quite sure that problem is in absolute path to site in localhost. It goes like “http://www.localhost/joomla/index.php”. Believe it should be without www prefix, but I am constantly redirected to www. Just to notice that original live site htaccess file was removed.

    Any info how can solve this issue. I would appreciate any help.
    Thank you in advance.

  6. Hi, thanks for the tutorial , wanted to ask i have this problem when i restored my site on my PC local machine xampp after everything is finished i can get into my Site frontend but not backend
    can even type user name or password says access forbidden

    please help me with this 

  7. The info in the yellow UPDATE box was that vital piece I was looking for. Thanks, since I was struggling with it with no clue. I even tried to re-link my menus manually 🙂
    You probably saved me a day – where can I donate? 😀

    •  Glad you found it helpful, Kutt. That had me stumped before too, then I remembered the .htaccess file – it was like the secret ingredient that’s oh-so-necessary.

      If you’re serious about a donation, you can use PayPal and john [at] blackhillswebworks.com.

      Thanks for commenting!
      John

    • Hi Addie,

      It might have something to do with the temporary address you’re using, though I’m not sure about that. Is there another htaccess file in there that is still titled htaccess.txt?

      I checked the link but without backend and FTP access I can’t really do anything else. Let me know at john [at] blackhillswebworks.com if you want me to pursue this any further.

      Thanks,
      John

    • Looks like you figured it out! Would you mind letting us know what it was? Chances are someone else will run into the same issue and it may help them out of a bind.

      Thanks!

  9. Thank you for the tutorial. I still have the .jpa file in my files. Can I safely delete this? I deleted all the .ini files, but I am not sure about this one.

  10. Hi John, If you get this post I’d be glad of your advice and help. I have seemingly successfully backed up and restored from local server to live. However, I am now getting an error message at the administrator login saying that the cache is not writeable, and a problem with Akeeba lazy plugin needs to be configured. At this stage I can’t get into the backend of the site to try to see what the problem is.
    Are you able to guide me as to what I should try to do next?
    Geoff D

    • Hi Geoff,

      Have you seen this page from Akeeba’s site? https://www.akeebabackup.com/documentation/akeeba-backup-documentation/lazy-scheduling-plugin.html

      If you have the lazy plugin installed on your local site you should probably disable it and try the move again.

      For the cache issue, have you tried setting the CHMOD permissions on your files and directories? Files should be 644 and directories should be 755. Filezilla works great for doing this task, by the way.

      John

      • John, Thanks for this no I hadn’t read the page from the Akeeba site, thanks for the link.
        Sorry to seem a dummy about this, but the CHMOD permissions, do they reside within the configuration.php file?
        Happy New Year to you, Geoff D

          • Good choice. In the “Remote site” window, right-click on your root directory, probably public_html or something similar, and select “File attributes…”

            Make sure “Numeric value” is 755, check the “Recurse into subdirectories” box, select the “Apply to directories only” radio button, and click “OK”. It will take several minutes to make or confirm the setting.

            Then do the same for files but change the value to 644 and “Apply to files only”

            That might fix the unwritable cache error, but in any case it’s a good security practice to do with any new site.

  11. After doing a restore, it looks to be good. Sometime when I login to the backend I have to do it twice for it to work. Yesterday I had a problem with a plugin, it spat out an error when in use, could there be some underlying installation issue? The process was so smooth, now I’m not sure if I should just start clean or turn to another restoring solution.

    • Hi Pedro,

      I doubt that the multiple login or the plugin issue has to do with Akeeba Backup. I’ve had to do multiple logins before, and my guess is that it’s related to browser cookies.

      John