Owner's reply: You tried to restore a site whose **third party** software – not written or maintained by our company – is incompatible with PHP 8 on a server running PHP 8. This is something that is not only common sense, but also explicitly documented. You never gave us the opportunity to discuss this productively with you. You sent us a borderline abusive email in the middle of our night, merely informing us that your false assumptions and misunderstandings would be submitted here on the JED as a review. Regrettably, this puts us in the distasteful situation of having to publicly rebuke your disinformation, with everything that entails about how other people will perceive you.

I am afraid that you are wrong on all four complaints you made namely that a. it cost you months of work, b. finding the backup path was difficult, c. support is paid because we have a [mild profanity redacted] product, and d. that Akeeba Backup was at fault.

a. It cost you nothing. Your site is still running after switching it back to PHP 7.4. You admitted this yourself.

b. The path to the backup archives is documented: https://www.akeeba.com/documentation/akeeba-backup-joomla/backup-now.html#qa-backup-location This page appears in the documentation index under the self-explanatory title "Where are my backups". It is also shown to you in the Manage Backups page, when you click the info icon to get the information about the backup archive. It's literally a folder called "backups" under the folder Joomla installs the component in.

c. The description here on the Joomla! Extensions Directory literally reads "The Akeeba Backup Core component, its documentation and its video tutorials are free of charge. Support for the software and an edition with advanced features (not listed above) are, however, not free of charge" and it also says to read the documentation. We discontinued free support in June 2011 because of the number of people who failed to employ common sense, or read the documentation, and hurled uncalled for abuse at us as a result – exactly as you are doing here.

If someone asks **politely** and provided that we're not up to our eyeballs with work, we do answer simple questions like yours. As it happens, this week is slow (since most of the US is off for Thanksgivings, severely lightening our load). Had you asked politely about what happened during your restoration we would have politely pointed you to the documentation page and explained further what to do.

d. Your entire problem is that you transferred your site from a PHP 7.4 server to a PHP 8 server. However, your third part (NOT written by us) extensions are **NOT** compatible with PHP 8.

Kindly remember that Akeeba Backup makes exact copies of your sites. It does not, and objectively cannot, rewrite the software installed on your site to make it compatible with a different PHP version. The very first page of the restoration script displays very clearly the PHP version you backed up on and the PHP version you are restoring on, as shown in https://www.akeeba.com/documentation/akeeba-backup-joomla/angie-joomla.html#angie-joomla-first Moreover, the fact that you need to pay attention to the PHP versions and that problems due to a PHP version mismatch are NOT restoration issues is explicitly documented in "Common issues on restored sites due to PHP incompatibilities between the source and target server" (https://www.akeeba.com/documentation/akeeba-backup-joomla/prphpissues.html)

Akeeba Backup – which is compatible with PHP versions 7.2 to the as-yet-unreleased version 8.3 inclusive since several months ago – did work. If it had not, switching your PHP version back to 7.4 would've had no effect. The fact that switching back to PHP 7.4 allowed your site to work further proves that the root cause of your issue is third party software on your site which is still incompatible with PHP 8, four years since it was first released.

I understand your frustration, but the way you conducted yourself is entitled, unfair, uncalled for, and unprofessional. In the end of the day, it was third party software not under out control which failed, not our software. In the end of the day, it was you who did not exercise common sense, read the documentation, or approached us for a clarification.

Owner's reply: Thank you for your review, but it's very objectively factually incorrect.

Our documentation does have troubleshooting instructions for the backup, restoration, and post-restoration of the site. As a matter of fact, I have put in writing our experience of having answered tens of thousands of support tickets, forum posts, emails, Facebook posts and DMs, Reddit posts, and in-person questions regarding these matters. The documentation which has this information is available free of charge to anyone so that nobody can falsely claim that the all important troubleshooting information is hidden behind a paywall. That is NOT my ethic and I take personal and grave offence at the mere insinuation that I would do something like that.

So, let's see how you can troubleshoot the restoration.

If you have a problem with the archive extraction of the backup archive go to our site, Support, Documentation, Akeeba Kickstart and scroll down to the Troubleshooting section. Relevant links:

* Akeeba Kickstart won't run at all or throws a Parse Error: https://www.akeeba.com/documentation/akeeba-kickstart-documentation/troubleshooting.html#kswontrunatall
* I get PHP Warning, Norice or Deprecated errors when trying to run Akeeba Kickstart: https://www.akeeba.com/documentation/akeeba-kickstart-documentation/ksphperrors.html
* Akeeba Kickstart starts but it does not list my archive files: https://www.akeeba.com/documentation/akeeba-kickstart-documentation/ksnoarchives.html
* Akeeba Kickstart starts, but can't extract the archive, throws an AJAX Error, Invalid Archive Header or other error: https://www.akeeba.com/documentation/akeeba-kickstart-documentation/kscantextract.html
* I am getting AJAX errors with some weird 403, 500, 502 or 503 code: https://www.akeeba.com/documentation/akeeba-kickstart-documentation/ajax-error-weird-code.html
* Extraction stuck on Windows: https://www.akeeba.com/documentation/akeeba-kickstart-documentation/stuck-on-windows.html

If you have a problem with the actual site restoration script (ANGIE) and assuming you are using Akeeba Backup for Joomla 4, you go to our site, Support, Documentation, Akeeba Backup for Joomla 4 and scroll down to "Restoration (ANGIE) troubleshooting". Here are the relevant links:

* ANGIE reports that the session write path and the installation directory is unreadable: https://www.akeeba.com/documentation/akeeba-backup-joomla/abiissues.html#abisession
* PHP errors , warnings, notices or a blank page upon accessing ANGIE / restoration: https://www.akeeba.com/documentation/akeeba-backup-joomla/abiphperrors.html
* Some required or optional settings are red in ANGIE's first page: https://www.akeeba.com/documentation/akeeba-backup-joomla/abiredsettings.html
* I can't restore my database, or receive AJAX Error, timeout or other errors while restoring my database with ANGIE: https://www.akeeba.com/documentation/akeeba-backup-joomla/abidatabase.html
* I restored my database but can't proceed to the next page of ANGIE: https://www.akeeba.com/documentation/akeeba-backup-joomla/abiafterdb.html
* My configuration.php wasn't written to disk after ANGIE ran: https://www.akeeba.com/documentation/akeeba-backup-joomla/abinoconfig.html
* Any other ANGIE error: https://www.akeeba.com/documentation/akeeba-backup-joomla/abimisc.html

If you have a problem with the site after the restoration and assuming you are using Akeeba Backup for Joomla 4, you go to our site, Support, Documentation, Akeeba Backup for Joomla 4 and scroll down to "Troubleshooting restored sites". Relevant links:

* Common issues on restored sites and how to solve them: https://www.akeeba.com/documentation/akeeba-backup-joomla/restoration-troubleshooting.html#prbasicts
* Common issues on restored sites due to PHP incompatibilities between the source and target server: https://www.akeeba.com/documentation/akeeba-backup-joomla/prphpissues.html
* When updating the restored site, the original site changes as well (Entangled web sites): https://www.akeeba.com/documentation/akeeba-backup-joomla/prentangled.html
* Clicking on a link on the restored site takes me to the original site (link migration issues): https://www.akeeba.com/documentation/akeeba-backup-joomla/prlinkmigration.html
* Issues arising from your computer configuration, browser, ISP, antivirus and firewall incompatibilities: https://www.akeeba.com/documentation/akeeba-backup-joomla/client-site-troubleshooting.html

Further to that, we have collected invaluable generic information concerning backing up and restoring sites in "General guidelines for backing up and restoring your site": https://www.akeeba.com/documentation/akeeba-backup-joomla/restoring-backups.html#general-guidelines

If all else fails, you **can** restore your backups using the "Unorthodox: the emergency restoration procedure": https://www.akeeba.com/documentation/akeeba-backup-joomla/unorthodox-emergency-restoration.html

So, please, do not rate the software and the documentation based on your false assumptions. Actually do put the effort into reading the documentation, it has the information you need to help yourself. If you cannot be bothered reading the documentation I will be happy to help, but I do expect you to pay for a subscription because you are asking me to spend my time to save yours, so it's only fair to ask you for compensation — that's how I finance the full time job of maintaining this software, sponsoring Joomla events, and contributing back to Joomla (just look at all my contributions including but not limited to Joomla Update, WebAuthn, Two Factor Authentication, Multi-factor Authentication, Quick Icons and much, much more). In short, either use your time for free, or use mine for a small fee (and simultaneously fund the development of this software and Joomla itself).