Last Sunday, one of my colleagues accidentally deleted a crucial flow for an upcoming presentation with the manager on Monday. My colleague informed me about the situation, and I quickly created a solution to recover the deleted flow using Power Automate.
In this Power Automate tutorial, I will explain how to restore deleted flow in Power Automate.
Restore Deleted Flow in Power Automate
Before I proceed, it’s important to clarify that a Power Automate flow can only be restored within 21 days of deletion. Additionally, if you’re an admin, you can easily accomplish this recovery using the Power Automate Management connector.
For this example, I created a simple Power Automate Instant Cloud flow that sends an email when I run it.
Now I deleted this flow as you can send the screenshot below:
Now, follow the steps below to restore the above flow:
1. In Power Automate, click the Instant Cloud flow, enter the Flow name, and choose the trigger flow (i.e., manually trigger a flow).
2. Add the “List Flows as Admin” action and select the environment from which you want to restore the flow. Also, select “Yes” for the “Include Soft-Deleted Flows” option.
3. Sometimes, the deleted flow may be missing if you run the flow. If this happens, enable the pagination setting in the action’s Settings tab and set the threshold to a number higher than the total flows in your environment.
4. Then save and test your flow. After testing the flow, check the output of an action. It says ‘Download (Alt or Option + select)’ inside the json list of all the flows created in your tenant.
5. When you select that, it will open a new tab all in json. Click ‘ctrl+f‘ in the search box and put your flow name. In my case, the flow name is ‘Send an Email‘. Then copy the flow’s ‘name‘.
6. Now edit the flow and add the Restore Deleted Flow as Admin action and provide the Environment from the dropdown and inside the flow past the name we copied above.
Run the Flow to Restore Deleted Power Automate Flow
Now save the flow and click Test Select Manually -> Click on Test inside the Test Flow tab.
Once the flow runs successfully, go to the Power Automate home page, where you can see that the deleted flow has been restored successfully.
I hope you followed all the steps to restore the Power Automate flow you deleted. Remember that if more than 21 days have passed since the flow was deleted, you won’t be able to recover it using this method.
Also, you may like some more Power Automate articles:
- How to Auto Approve Request Using Power Automate
- How to Use Power Automate Send an Email (V2) Action
- Move/Copy Files From OneDrive to SharePoint Using Power Automate
- Overwrite Files Using Create File Action in Power Automate
After working for more than 18 years in Microsoft technologies like SharePoint, Microsoft 365, and Power Platform (Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI), I thought will share my SharePoint expertise knowledge with the world. Our audiences are from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, etc. For my expertise knowledge and SharePoint tutorials, Microsoft has been awarded a Microsoft SharePoint MVP (12 times). I have also worked in companies like HP, TCS, KPIT, etc.
