AJAX (refreshless) uses AJAX mode. This is the fastest method but requires a compatible browser (Internet Explorer 6+, Mozilla Firefox 1.5+, Konqueror 3.5.9+, Google Chrome, Safari or Opera 9+). Furthermore, it is possible that on certain server configuration it will fail. Specifically, it will fail on servers which tamper with the script output, by forcing pop-up advertisements for example, or whose PHP verbosity is set too high.

JavaScript Redirects is a fall-back method which should work on virtually any server setup. It is slower, because after each step the whole page is reloaded and a small piece of JavaScript code makes sure that the browser advances to the next step of the extraction process.

The " Write directly to files " option uses the quickest and most conservative approach of writing the files directly from within the PHP code. However, it might impossible to use if there are insufficient permissions, PHP Safe Mode is activated or there are other server-specific restrictions. Kickstart will attempt to detect this kind of errors and warn you just before the extraction process begins.

The " Use FTP " option will attempt to use FTP access to write the extracted files to disk, using the FTP options you can configure on the text box below.

	Important
	FTP mode requires normal write access to the directory where kickstart.php resides in. This is because each file gets extracted as a temporary file in this folder first and is then "uploaded" using FTP. This is a limitation of PHP not (widely) supporting appending file writes using FTP.

The configured FTP " initial directory " must point to the same directory as the one kickstart.php resides in. Kickstart will test for this and abort with an error message if it can't detect itself in the " initial directory ".

Some restrictions apply to the FTP mode. You can only use plain FTP servers, but not any of the FTP variants such as SFTP, FTPS, etc. If you try to do something like that, Kickstart will not be able to connect to the FTP server.

The FTP host must be given as a domain or IP address, with a protocol prefix. Valid examples are "localhost", "ftp.example.com", "example.com", "192.168.0.1". However, using something like "ftp://localhost", "ftp://example.com/var/www", "ftp://user@pass:example.com/var/www" will not work. The FTP connection parameters (username and password) are to be typed in in the respective fields below the FTP host.

A note on what the initial directory is and how to set it up. It is the absolute FTP path where kickstart.php resides in and where your site's root will be located after the restoration is over. In order to find it, you can use FileZilla or any other FTP software. Just connect to your site, navigate to the directory where kickstart.php and your archive are and copy the FTP path. In FileZilla's default theme this is located above the right-hand directories pane (showing the directories on your FTP server). It usually looks something like /public_html or /httpdocs or /www, but this basically depends on your host so my guess is as good as any. Just copy this whole string (including the leading slash, if any!) and copy it to the initial directory field of Kickstart.

Maximum archive chunk to process per step (Bytes). Kickstart splits the extraction process in smaller chunks, in order to avoid server timeouts. There are two conditions which define a chunk: the minimum amount of data extracted and the maximum number of files extracted. This option controls the former condition and is expressed in bytes. The default value, 1024768, means that Kickstart will try to extract at least 1Mb of data before concluding the chunk.

Setting this to higher values will speed up the process, because it creates less chunks and, therefore, less time has to be spent rendering the extraction process and wasted on network operations to and from the browser. On the downside, on slower hosts it might cause a timeout.

Maximum number of files to process at once. Kickstart splits the extraction process in smaller chunks, in order to avoid server timeouts. There are two conditions which define a chunk: the minimum amount of data extracted and the maximum number of files extracted. This option controls the latter condition and is expressed in number of files. The default values, 40, means that at most 40 files will be extracted, even if their total size is less than MAXBATCHSIZE bytes.

Setting this to higher values will speed up the process, because it creates less chunks and, therefore, less time has to be spent rendering the extraction process and wasted on network operations to and from the browser. On the downside, on slower hosts it might cause a timeout.

Minimum execution time per step (milliseconds). Kickstart 2.4 onwards uses the same anti-DoS solution compatibility scheme as the JoomlaPack component. This means that it tries to make each page load last at least as many milliseconds as this setting. This allows Kickstart to avoid failing with 403 Forbidden error messages if it runs too fast on your server. The default value, 2000, means that Kickstart's page loads will last at least 2 seconds (2000 milliseconds divided by 1000 milliseconds per second equals 2 seconds). While this is a sane value for very sensitive hosts, it will slow Kickstart down considerably on faster hosts. In such a case, you may try lowering this value to 1000, 500 or even lower. Setting it to 0 will result in Kickstart running at full speed. This is no exact science, so you may want to experiment with it a bit. According to my experience values around 600 yield a perfect balance between speed and avoiding 403 Forbidden error messages.

Temporary directory. Kickstart needs a writable temporary directory for its normal operation. By default, it is set to be the same directory as the one Kickstart is located in. If for any reason this directory is not writable (for example, FTP mode is required to write to that directory) you can manually override the temporary directory location using this setting. For instance, if you want to set the temporary directory location to /tmp (a common writable temporary directory in Linux systems) change this setting to /tmp.

Another useful tip, especially if neither the Direct File Writes nor the FTP modes are working, is to create a directory named kicktemp inside your site's root directory with your favorite FTP client and set its permissions to 0777 (read, write and execute to user, group and "others"). Then, change this setting by appending kicktemp to it. For instance, on Windows hosts this setting might read something like C:\wamp\www\test; modify it to read C:\wamp\www\test\kicktemp. On Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, FreeBSD and other UNIX variants hosts it will read something like /home/myuser/httpdocs; modify it to read /home/myuser/httpdocs/kicktemp.

This trick only works if PHP Safe Mode is not enabled on your account. If the PHP Safe Mode is enabled, there is no known way to use Kickstart, except than begging your host to change the owner of your site's root to be the same as the user the web server runs under. Do keep in mind that this approach is not very secure and the ownership should be reverted after the restoration process is over.

Pass-through chunk size while extracting large files (bytes) . When Kickstart is extracting files stored uncompressed in the archive (large files), it does so by reading a chunk of the uncompressed data to memory, then writing it to disk. It repeats this procedure until all file data has been processed.

The most time consuming part of this process is writing to the disk. Increasing the chunk's size results in fewer write operations and less time is consumed, at a risk of running out of memory. This setting is expressed in bytes and the default value, 1024768, represents 1Mb of information. You can usually set it to 6200000, or even higher depending on your PHP configuration settings, without any side effects, greatly increasing Kickstart's performance, especially if you have a large number of big files in your backup archive.