FM Backup

FM Backup is a free, open-source backup and restore suite for Joomla 6. It captures your entire site — every file plus the full database — into a single portable ZIP archive, and restores it just as easily. No account, no upsell, no paid tier holding the restore function hostage.

Why another backup component?

Most backup failures on shared hosting come down to one thing: PHP gives up before the job finishes. FM Backup is built around that constraint from the ground up. Backups run as a stepped engine — the browser drives the job in small, bounded chunks, so a run never depends on a single long-lived PHP request. You get a live progress bar, and a job that survives the hosting limits which break naive backup scripts.

Key features

• Full site capture — files and database in one archive, with an embedded manifest.json recording the profile, date, Joomla version and database prefix.
• Backup profiles — define as many as you like. Each has its own include/exclude rules for both files and database tables, so you can keep a fast "database only" profile alongside a full monthly archive.
• External folders — include directories that live outside your Joomla root, configured per profile.
• Live progress with pause and resume — real-time percentage and log output. Navigate away mid-run and the job pauses cleanly; come back and it picks up where it stopped.
• Smart compression — already-compressed files (images, video, PDFs, fonts, archives) are stored rather than re-compressed, which is typically the single biggest speed win on a media-heavy site.
• Efficient database dumps — cursor-based pagination keeps each chunk the same cost whether a table holds a thousand rows or a million.
• Restore that works on any server — the restore picker reads archives straight off disk and reads each one's manifest from inside the ZIP. It never needs a matching log record, so an archive from one site restores cleanly onto another. Database prefixes are rewritten automatically during import.
• Scheduled backups — a Task plugin plugs into Joomla's native Scheduler for unattended runs, with a separate purge task for age-based cleanup.
• Two-layer retention — keep the newest N archives per profile, and independently purge anything older than a set number of days. The purge always spares the most recent archive, so you are never left with nothing.
• Dashboard quick icon — backup status visible on the Joomla control panel at a glance.
• Secure by default — archives can be stored outside the web root, downloads are CSRF-protected and path-traversal hardened, and FM Backup's own tables are protected during a restore so the engine can't wipe its state mid-run.
• Detailed logs — every run keeps a full step-by-step log with elapsed timings, so a failure tells you exactly where it stopped.

What's in the package

One install file delivers the component plus two plugins:

• com_fmbackup — the backup and restore component
• plg_task_fmbackup — Scheduler tasks for automated backups and purging
• plg_quickicon_fmbackup — control panel status icon

Requirements

• Joomla 6.0 or later
• PHP 8.1 or later, with the zip extension enabled
• MySQL or MariaDB

Installation

Install the package through System → Install → Extensions in the usual way. Set your storage path and retention under Options, create a profile, and run your first backup. Updates arrive through Joomla's built-in updater.

Released under the GNU GPL v2 or later.