As Freek Van der Herten mentions in this post to his site the latest release of the Laravel backup package has been released - version 3 - with some major improvements over previous releases.

Today our team released a new major version of laravel-backup. It can backup the files and databases of your application to one or more external filesystems. It uses Laravel’s native cloud filesystem to do this. The package can also notify you via Slack and/or email when something goes wrong with your backups. We’ve also created a dedicated site with full documentation. In this blogpost we want to give you some background of why and how the package was created.

They start out with a bit of history about the package, talking about how they created it to fill their own needs and how its risen in popularity since its release. Following this the post talks about new features in version 3 including:

• Taking backups
• Cleaning up old backups
• Monitoring the health of all backups
• Sending notifications

There's also some brief mentions of other new features around event hooks and adding additional information to the backup file. There's a bit of code shared to show the quality/readbility of the code and links over to various resources on the documentation site as well. Finally they mention some information about the use of the package in PHP 5 (it has become PHP 7 focused with this release) and some of the alternatives that are out there.