Akeeba Backup can be used for much more than just backing up your site. Some indicative uses are:
Security backups. Taking a snapshot of your site should your server fail, or a hacker exploit some security hole to deface or compromise your site.
Template sites. Web professionals have used Akeeba Backup in order to create "template sites". This means that you can build a site on a local server, install every component you usually do on most clients' sites and back it up. You now have a canned site that can serve as a great template for future clients. Using the same method you can have a snapshot of all the sites you have built for your clients, without the need to have them installed on your local server.
Build a site off-line (or on a development server), upload the finished site easily. Web professionals can build a complete site off-line on a local server, or on-line on a development server. When done they can take a backup with Akeeba Backup and restore it on the production site. This minimises the downtime of the production site.
Testing upgrades locally, without risking breaking the on-line site. Joomla!™ updates and updates to its extensions have the potential of breaking things, especially the more and more complex extensions you are using. Site owners use Akeeba Backup to get a site snapshot, restore it on a local test server, perform the upgrade there and test for any problems without the live site being at risk.
Troubleshooting locally. Web professionals can use Akeeba Backup to take a backup of a client's Joomla!™ site and restore it locally to reproduce, identify and resolve an issue with the site. If resolving the issue required a more substantial change than changing a file or two they can use Akeeba Backup once again to transfer the fixed site back to the production server.
Moving a site to a new host. Site owners who want to take their site to a new host have found Akeeba Backup to be a major time saver. Just backup the original site and restore on the new host; your site is relocated with virtually no effort at all.
Our users tell us that Akeeba Backup has saved them hours of frustrating work, according to our users. This is what makes it unique. It doesn't make site backups and site transfers possible, it makes them so much easier.
Akeeba Backup comes in two editions, Core and Professional. Akeeba Backup Core is free of charge and contains all the features a typical hobby or semi-professional single site owner would like to have in order to easily complete backup and restoration jobs. Even web professionals find it very useful to transfer sites between servers. On top of that, the video tutorials and the full documentation are free of charge as well.
Akeeba Backup Professional addresses the more particular needs of web professionals and web agencies, handling numerous and / or high-value sites. It has features such as inclusion of external directories and databases, powerful filters based on regular expressions, and support for sending your backups on cloud storage services (such as Amazon S3, Dropbox or any other of the 40+ supported providers).
Both versions are released under the same license GNU General Public Licence version 3 (GPLv3) or, at your option, any later version of the licence published by the Free Software Foundation. This means that you can use it on as many sites as you want, yours or your clients', without paying additional fees or expensive "developer licenses". All we ask of you is that you make it clear to your clients that they are not our clients, therefore you are responsible for providing updates and support for Akeeba Backup to them.
Disclaimer: Whether Akeeba Backup and its restoration works for you is highly dependent on conditions outside our control such as your server setup, your server configuration and your PHP configuration as well as the way you configure and use the software. We do provide free of charge versions of our software which let you evaluate it before purchasing a subscription and we do offer support which can potentially work around some server configuration issues. We consider it self-evident that despite our best efforts if you are unwilling to let us help you or if the problem is ultimately something that only your host can address we bear no responsibility whatsoever and accept absolutely no liability per the license our software is distributed under and our Terms of Service.