How to extract and restore a Joomla! .jpa archive or backup?
Firstly, upload the .jpa archive in the document root directory of your website via FTP.
Download the Akeeba Kickstart script from their official website and upload the kickstart ZIP file in the same folder where you have the .jpa archive. Once the ZIP file is uploaded, you will need to extract it using your FTP client. This will put multiple files in that directory similar to:
da-DK.kickstart.ini
de-DE.kickstart.ini
el-GR.kickstart.ini
en-GB.kickstart.ini
es-ES.kickstart.ini
fr-FR.kickstart.ini
it-IT.kickstart.ini
kickstart.php
nb-NO.kickstart.ini
nl-NL.kickstart.ini
pt-BR.kickstart.ini
ru-RU.kickstart.ini
sv-SE.kickstart.ini
tr-TR.kickstart.ini
uk-UA.kickstart.ini
zh-CN.kickstart.ini
Access the kickstart.php script via your browser. For example, if you have uploaded the file in the public_html directory for your primary domain, access it under:
http://yourdomain.com/kickstart.php
If you load the website from a subfolder (e.g. http://yourdomain.com/subfolder/) and you have uploaded there the files mentioned above (public_html/subfolder) use the following link:
http://yourdomain.com/subfolder/kickstart.php
A notification window with the “Things you should know about Akeeba Kickstart” title will be open. You can safely close it by clicking on:
“Click here or press ESC to close this message”
After you close this window you can proceed with the restoration:
- Select the .jpa archive file you want to restore from the drop-down list. In the second field place the password if the archive has been password protected;
- Write to files – Directly;
- Fine tune – these settings can be used to bypass the timeout settings of your host. For example, if you try to extract larger .jpa archive on a shared server, this will probably exceed the timeout settings and will cause the restoration to fail. Leave the settings as they are by default during the first attempt and change them if it fails;
- Hit the big green “Start” button to start the restore;
- Another window will show up with a progress bar indicating the status of the restore. When it completes successfully a green button will appear named “Run the Installer“. Click on it and then click “Next“. If you restore a backup created on one host to another you might need to adjust the database settings at that step. At the DB restore step you should provide an empty database with a user permitted to access it. Except for the database login settings, you can leave the rest of the settings in the DB restore section unchanged. If you restore on the same server where the backup has been created, the database settings will be the same and you could skip this step.
- Click on “Next” to proceed. This will show another progress bar. Allow it to finish and click “OK“. This will lead you to the “Site Info” section. Do not change anything if you restore on the same server. If you restore to another server, the only required change you should do is to check the box besides the “Override tmp and log paths. Use the directories under your new site’s root” label. Click “Next” again to reach the last step where the installation directory from the Joomla! 3.x root folder should be deleted.
After the installation directory is deleted, you can access your Joomla! website and administrator panel.