Solution Export & Backup Scheduler

Overview

A scheduled cloud flow that performs an unattended backup of a Dataverse solution on a weekly cadence. Each Monday at 02:00 Eastern, the flow calls ExportSolutionAsync, waits for the export job to complete, downloads the resulting .zip, uploads it to an Azure Blob Storage container with a date-stamped filename, and sends a success notification email. All runtime values (org URL, solution name, storage account, container, recipient) are parameterized as environment variables so the flow can be repointed at any tenant without edits.

Use Case

Enterprise Power Platform tenants frequently need offsite, version-stamped copies of Dataverse solutions for compliance, disaster recovery, or build-archive purposes. The standard Solution Checker and PDT backups only cover platform-level exports — they do not produce per-solution snapshots on a schedule. This flow closes that gap with a fully managed, connector-driven pattern that requires no Azure Functions, no service principals, and no custom hosting.

Flow Architecture

Environment Variables

Connectors & Connections

Note — All connections are referenced as solution connection references; the flow is portable between environments as long as a connection is mapped at import time.

Customization Guide

Almost every realistic variant of this flow can be implemented by changing environment variable values. A few cases require small edits inside the flow definition — those are called out explicitly below.

Set environment variable current values after import

Open the imported solution and update the five environment variable current values (not the defaults) on the Environment Variables page. flowlibs_SolutionUniqueName must point at a solution that actually exists in the target tenant, and flowlibs_BackupStorageAccountUrl must correspond to a storage account where the signed-in Azure Blob connection has write access to the configured container.

Change the backup cadence

Edit the Recurrence trigger directly. Defaults are frequency: Week, interval: 1, weekDays: [Monday], hours: [2], minutes: [0], timeZone: Eastern Standard Time. Adjust any of these to fit your maintenance window.

Handle long-running exports

If export jobs for large solutions exceed two minutes, either raise the Delay action to a longer duration or replace it with a Do-Until loop that polls the export job status (via the GetSolutionExportStatus action) until completion before downloading.

Repoint the destination storage

To send backups to a different storage account or container, update flowlibs_BackupStorageAccountUrl and flowlibs_BackupContainerName. The Compose StorageAccountName step automatically re-derives the account short name from the URL, so no edits to the flow definition are needed.

Key Expressions

The flow is intentionally light on Power Fx / WDL gymnastics — the heaviest expressions are the branch-name concatenation and the approval outcome check. They are listed below in the order they appear in the flow.

utcNow('yyyy-MM-dd-HHmm')

split(split(variables('varStorageAccountUrl'), '//')[1], '.')[0]

body('Start_Export_Solution_Async')?['ExportJobId']

base64ToBinary(body('Download_Solution_Export_Data')?['ExportSolutionFile'])