Most backup failures on shared hosting come down to one thing: PHP gives up before the job finishes. FM Backup runs as a stepped engine — the browser drives the job in small, bounded chunks, so a run never depends on a single long-lived PHP request. You get a live progress bar, and a job that survives the limits which break naive backup scripts.

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Key features

• Full site capture — files and database in one archive, with an embedded manifest recording the profile, date, Joomla version and database prefix.
• Backup profiles — as many as you like, each with its own file and table include/exclude rules. Keep a fast "database only" profile alongside a full monthly archive, and include folders outside your Joomla root.
• Scheduled backups — a Task plugin drives unattended runs through Joomla's native Scheduler, with a separate age-based purge task.
• Pause and resume — real-time progress and log output. Navigate away mid-run and the job pauses cleanly, then picks up where it stopped.
• Built for speed — already-compressed files (images, video, PDFs) are stored rather than re-compressed, and cursor-based pagination keeps database chunks the same cost whether a table holds a thousand rows or a million.
• Restore that works on any server — the picker reads archives straight off disk, so an archive from one site restores cleanly onto another with no matching log record. Database prefixes are rewritten automatically.
• Two-layer retention — keep the newest N archives per profile, and independently purge anything older than a set age. The purge always spares the most recent, so you are never left with nothing.
• Secure by default — archives can live outside the web root, downloads are CSRF-protected and traversal-hardened, and FM Backup's own tables are protected during a restore.
• Detailed logs — every run keeps a step-by-step log with elapsed timings, so a failure tells you exactly where it stopped.

What's in the package

One install file delivers comfmbackup (the component), plgtaskfmbackup (Scheduler tasks for automated backups and purging) and plgquickicon_fmbackup (a control panel status icon).

Requirements

Joomla 6.0+, PHP 8.1+ with the zip extension, MySQL or MariaDB.

Installation

Install through System → Install → Extensions. Set your storage path and retention under Options, create a profile, and run your first backup. Updates arrive through Joomla's built-in updater.

Released under the GNU GPL v2 or later.

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