Knowledge Base

Backup Failed. Unexpected error: Base directory for SSL policy with name 'default' does not exist.

This article is based on a defect report with a suggested workaround until a fix becomes available.

When running backup (full or incremental) you may encounter the following error in the output, and as a result, the backup is not working:

unexpected error: Base directory '/users/neo4j/neo4j-enterprise-3.5.8/backups/certificates/ssl_policy' for SSL policy with name 'default' does not exist.

You may encounter this issue when using SSL and regardless of using encryption for backups or not.

The configuration that is exposing this issue is:

dbms.ssl.policy.default.base_directory=certificates/ssl_policy

The key to this issue is if you are using relative paths instead of absolute paths. With a relative path, the backup will fail with the shown error.

Workaround: To resolve this issue, use an absolute path instead for the SSL configuration setting:

dbms.ssl.policy.default.base_directory=/users/neo4j/neo4j-enterprise-3.5.8/certificates/ssl_policy

Additionally this issue is resolved by upgrading to Neo4j 3.5.9 or later