Akeeba Remote Control is an innovative solution for remote site backup. Forget the cumbersome solutions which involve using CRON, wget and cryptic URL setups. Akeeba Remote Control is a productive desktop GUI which "talks" to your site's Akeeba Backup Core or Professional installation, automatically performing a backup and downloading it to your PC! It can perform this operation on multiple sites simultaneously. The whole process can be scheduled to run at user-selectable intervals, as long as your PC is turned on and Remote Control is running.
On the technical aspect of things, Akeeba Remote Control consists of two parts. The first part is an XMLRPC plugin for your Joomla! site. This plugin (plg_jpremote) directly interfaces to your site's Akeeba Backup installation, exposing its interface through XML-RPC in a secure manner. It is not unlike other XMLRPC plugins, e.g. Blogger or MetaWeblog API plugins, only that instead of exposing content it exposes backup funtionality.
The second part is a desktop application for Microsoft Windows™. It is a graphical user interface which "talks" to the XMLRPC plugin on your site(s), performs the backup operation and can optionally download the backup file to your PC using FTP. It supports multiple site and profile definitions which you can start either one at a time or all of them at once. When backing up multiple sites, the backup operations run in parallel, utilizing the maximum potential of your network bandwidth. This makes Remote a very productive solution for busy webmasters. It can even be minimized to the system tray, away from view; it's simply fire-and-forget backup!
Akeeba Remote Control can run on a variety of operating systems when used with WINE. We have successful reports of Remote running on leading Windows versions (XP and Vista), various Linux distributions and Mac OS X (on Intel-based Mac's). Last - but not least - Remote can be set up as a portable application. You can simply put it in a USB flash disk or removable hard disk and take it with you. At the time of this writing (June 2010) a cross-platform version with a simpler interface, capable of running on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X is under development.
How much does such a tool cost, you may ask. It doesn't cost a dime! Akeeba Remote Control is Free Software, both as in "free speech" and as in "free beer". The plugin is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or - at your option - any later version and the desktop application is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or - at your option - any later version. We do our best to provide you with interoperable, Free software and make it gratis. But if you feel it has helped you save effort, time and - why not? - money, we kindly ask you to donate any amount you deem appropriate. Donation links appear in the About dialog of the application, as well as throughout our site.