Bug in Akeeba Backup 4.7.0 – Update sites removed on your site

Details Published: 15 May 2016

An issue in Akeeba Backup 4.7.0 may have removed the update sites from your Joomla! installation. We have a fix for that. Please read on.

What are update sites?

Update sites are entries in your site's database which tell Joomla! where to find updates. Joomla! uses this information to find updates for itself, core supported extensions as well as third party extensions.

What happens when update sites are deleted?

When update sites are deleted Joomla! no longer knows how to look for updates. As a result you may end up running outdated versions of Joomla! and your installed extensions. Therefore you either need the update sites or you need to update your extensions manually.

Why were my update sites deleted when installing 4.7.0?

Due to the way Joomla! extension updates work, Joomla! couldn't see the update to Akeeba Backup 5.0.0 unless you either installed it manually or you made a modification in Akeeba Backup's update site. Akeeba Backup 4.7.0 was designed to make this necessary database change automatically. Unfortunately, a bug in the update code was being triggered on many sites, leading to the loss of all update site definitions except Akeeba Backup's

How can I fix the missing update sites?

Since Joomla! does not provide a mechanism for reinstalling deleted update sites we created a small component to do that. Please download and install the Fix Update Sites component from the following URL:

The component runs automatically after installation and fixes your site. Therefore you can uninstall it right after installing it.

Known issues with the fix

If you have official Joomla! translations (languages) installed you will have to reinstall them. Due to the very odd way updates to official Joomla! translations are handled we cannot reliably restore their update sites.

The name for the Joomla! and JED update sites is currently "Update site for joomla files". This also has to do with the extremely odd way Joomla! handles the update sites for itself.

If you have Professional versions of the Akeeba components you need to go to each component's main page and click on the Refresh Update Information button to re-apply the Download ID in a way that Joomla! can see it. If you do not do that you'll see the updates to these components but you will not be able to install them.

Why isn't this fix included in Akeeba Backup itself?

This kind of fix needs to run once and only on affected sites. It is impossible to detect whether your site is affected in any reliable way, let alone ensure that the fix only runs once. As a result we chose to release the fix as a standalone component.

In conclusion

We do test our software extensively before release. Sometimes issues do slip through. In this case we had been testing this update for three weeks and under various scenarios. This issue was detected and fixed. Unfortunately, the fixes applied seem to have only covered two thirds of the conditions under which this issue was triggered. So despite the thorough testing and the fixes applied this issue did slip through. Such is the nature of mass distributed software which has to run on many different configurations, under a third party platform.

We understand that this may have caused inconvenience to several people who installed the updates automatically –especially through third party services– over the weekend. Therefore we created and made available the component that fixes the effects issue, as well as publishing an emergency update (4.7.1) to prevent this issue from causing trouble to more sites..