When dealing with backup software, the actual backup process is only half of the utility of the software. The other and most important half is restoring your backups. Somewhere in between the two steps we can see a problem forming. Many vendors choose proprietary formats for their backup archives, making it virtually impossible for third party vendors and their users alike to use the backup files outside of their backup software. This leads to vendor lock-in situations. We are strongly against such situations. We value transparency and freedom, hence our software is licensed under the liberal GNU General Public License. In fact, Akeeba Backup was designed with Freedom of Choice in mind since it's very first version. We ended up supporting two archive formats: the widely supported ZIP format and our own JPA format which is optimised for use on web servers.

As part of our pledge to transparency, we are releasing the full specification of the JPA format with our documentation. PKWare also releases their ZIP format specification on the web. Unfortunately, this is not enough from an end-user's perspective. There is an immediate need for readily available software which "talks" these formats and is able to extract them. To this end, we have created both web-based and desktop software which can extract the archives generated by Akeeba Backup. You may already be acquainted with the web-based software, called Akeeba Kickstart. The desktop application is called Akeeba eXtract Wizard and this is what is documented in here.

In its original version, eXtract Wizard was a Windows™-only application. Since 10% of our users use Mac OS X™ and another 5% use Linux™, this solution was suboptimal. Furthermore, being written in a different programming language than the rest of our software suite often caused issues and increased our workload. As a result, we decided to revamp eXtract Wizard. The major goals were to have it share a large part of its code base with the rest of our software and make it cross -platform, that is have it run on all three major Operating Systems our users are using. We ended up creating Akeeba eXtract Wizard 3.0 in Titanium, an Open Source solution which allows us to create cross-platform applications based on PHP, HTML and Javascript. On top of that, you get to receive the full source code of our application every time you download our software. We consider this a huge win for transparency and Freedom of Choice. Enjoy!