Proxy Error occurs while exporting a full site backup

Summary

A Proxy Error screen will be displayed when attempting to generate an XML backup while running Confluence behind a proxy.

Environment

• Any version of Confluence
• Running behind Apache reverse proxy in this example

Steps to Reproduce

1. Go to Cog Icon > Backup and Restore
2. Start a backup of the instance
3. Wait a few minutes (until the proxy timeout is reached)

Expected Results

Backup is completed with no error message.

Actual Results

The following error will be presented to the user:

Notes

This error happens because the full site backup procedure does not have a progress bar to indicate the state of the operation. When the backup is started, the browser keeps waiting for the backup to complete as in the following screenshot (notice Waiting for host message at the lower left corner of the screen):

If the instance is fairly large, the backup will take longer than the proxy timeout configured and result in the Proxy Error message shown previously. This is because there is no response from the application while the backup is being created.

Notice that the backup operation is not impacted. If you wait a for its completion, the backup will be available either in <confluence-home>/backups or <confluence-home>/temp. However, we do not have any indication of the process state besides checking if the backup file stopped growing and is zipped in the directory above.

A possible solution would be having a progress bar to this process, as we have for the XML import procedure.

This also affects other types of exports, like PDF ones.

Workaround

Increasing the proxy timeout is not feasible as the backup can take hours to complete

1. The first workaround is to wait for the backup to complete by checking <confluence-home>/temp. Once the file stops growing and a .zip file is created, the backup should be completed
2. The second workaround is to bypass the proxy and trigger the backup