CAUTION: CiviCRM 4.3 with Joomla 3.1.5

[Fred]

Hi. After installing CiviCRM with Joomla 3.15 I discovered a major problem when using Akeeba Backup. The backup restored without an error, and the site frontend worked fine, but I was unable to access the administrator backend. After completing the login screen, I was presented with a totally blank screen. Being unable to access the administrator, I did a lot of searching on Google and tried lots of things to get it working. Fortunately, I was working on local host and not the production site. I was able to verify that the issue was somewhere within the Joomla site since I was able to restore an older backup of the site. It took lots of trial and error (swapping files/folders) to finally isolate the problem to a CiviCRM folder. With the plugins/user/civicrm folder removed (renamed to cividcrm-bad), access to the administrator backend was restored with everything working as expected (except CiviCRM). I've now removed CiviCRM from my Joomla 3.1.5 system, and hope to find some time to further test it later, but I'm pretty new to both Joomla and CiviCRM so I'm not too optimistic that I will be able to isolate and/or find a resolution to the issue. Hopefully, someone here can replicate the issue and provide a solution/work-around.   

[Fred]

Doing some further testing, I've found that the problem isn't with the plugins/user/civicrm folder, but with the administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm.settings.php file being pointed to from the civicrm.php file inside the folder. As might be expected by its name, civicrm.settings.php contains file paths and other system specific settings so a direct backup of it from a server to a localhost will not work. In order to backup my site from the server to my localhost for development, what I've done, as a work-around is to configure Akeeba Backup to exclude the administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm.settings.php file from the backup, thus preserving the local civicrm.settings.php file from being overwritten when restoring the site to my localhost system. Since you have to know ahead of time that backing up and restoring on a different system will fail unless you exclude this file, it's not a good work-around to the issue, but it does work.