Backup Management

If your site has Akeeba Backup Professional installed, you can manage existing backups and take new backups directly through Panopticon. You can also scheduled automatic backups to be taken through Panopticon, which is useful if your site does not allow using CRON jobs, or is otherwise unable to run scheduled backups.

Taking and scheduling backups

At the top of the Backup section you will see a number of buttons.

Schedule Backups takes you to the Backup Tasks page where you can create and manage scheduled tasks to take backups of your site automatically. This is useful when your site's server does not support CRON jobs, or you can otherwise not schedule backups with Akeeba Backup using the automation options supported by your host.

Run Backup will schedule a backup of the site to be taken as soon as possible. The drop-down next to it allows you to select which backup profile you want to take the backup with. The backup is scheduled to be taken as soon as possible. When exactly it will start depends on how much free time your Akeeba Panopticon CRON Jobs have to run an additional task.

ℹ️ Manual backups are a special case of scheduled backups. They will appear in the Backup Tasks page when you set the “– Manual –” filter to “Manual”. Instead of a schedule they will display the message “Manual Backup”. This allows you to see if there are any scheduled backups running, but also why they have failed. Sure, the same information will be displayed in the Site Overview page, but only for the latest backup task.

ℹ️ Also note that the manual backup tasks will be reused. Once a manual backup task finishes it becomes disabled. Next you want to start a manual backup, this old manual backup task will be overwritten with the new manual backup information and become enabled again. This is a trick to better utilise the database space and prevent unnecessary performance degradation of your Panopticon installation.

Refresh Backup Info refreshes the list of backups displayed under Latest Backups.

Managing backups

You will see a list of your latest backups under the Latest Backups heading. The list is sorted by backup ID descending, meaning that you see the backup which started latest at the first row (top) of the table.

Each backup record shows you the following information:

• # The backup record ID. This is an internal identifier which can is used to manage the backup. You may want to use this, for example, with Akeeba Remote CLI to retrieve the backup archive on a different machine.
• Frozen. Indicates whether the backup is frozen (snowflake) or not (droplet). Frozen backups cannot be deleted.
• Description. Displays the description of the backup along with some useful information:
  • The date and time the backup started
  • The duration of the backup (how long it ran for)
  • The size of the backup
  • Which backup profile was used to take the backup
• Status. The status of the backup: Obsolete (trashcan), Remote (cloud), Running (play button), Failed (X), or OK (checkmark).
• Actions. Allows you to delete the backup record, or just the backup archive files (if they are stored on the site's server).

For more information on what all of that means you can consult Akeeba Backup's documentation. The Latest Backups view in Panopticon is a subset of Akeeba Backup's Manage Backups page.

What is Akeeba Backup?

Akeeba Backup is the backup software published by Akeeba Ltd, the same company who maintains Akeeba Panopticon.

Akeeba Backup takes full backups of your sites (database and files). These backups can be restored either on the same site, or even on a different server – you don't need to install Joomla! or WordPress, the backup archives are fully self-contained and do include the entire Joomla! or WordPress site including the CMS itself and its extensions, plugins, and themes. Therefore, they can be used for disaster recovery as well as transferring a backup to a different server, or a different location on the same server. It is also possible to take files-only and database-only backups to cater for more complex use cases.

Backup archives created by Akeeba Backup can either be stored on the same server the backup was taken (not advisable; if the server is compromised or otherwise becomes inaccessible you lose both the site and its backups, leaving you with nothing) or external storage such as Amazon S3, Wasabi, BackBlaze B2, Microsoft Azure BLOB Storage, Google Storage, Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, any server supporting WebDAV, FTP, or SFTP etc.

You can have multiple backup profiles with different settings. This is useful if you have a very big site. A full backup may take several hours and only be necessary sporadically, e.g. once a week or once a month. You could have more restrained backup profiles for frequently changed information on your site which you want to run daily, or even more often.

There are two editions of Akeeba Backup. The free of charge Core edition does not allow you to store your backups outside of your site's server, and cannot be managed remotely. Akeeba Panopticon does not support Akeeba Backup Core and will tell you so. The for-a-fee (paid) Akeeba Backup Professional edition supports all features, and can be used with Akeeba Panopticon.

Akeeba Backup Core and Akeeba Backup Professional are available for Joomla! and WordPress.

❗ Akeeba Solo, the self-hosted, CMS-agnostic backup product Akeeba Ltd publishes, is NOT supported by Akeeba Panopticon.