Automate the Backup of your Flow and Power Apps Canvas Application

A Power App could be backed up by creating a MSAPP file for the PowerApp. The file with extension .msapp is just a ZIP file which has all the definitions of the app. There are open source tools (Review Tool, Theme editor, App merger, Phone to tablet converter) available in github which helps us to peek at definition of the .msapp file.

PowerApps for App Makers connector has an action called “Get App” which helps us to get all the information related to the specified app. This action has a field called “readonlyValue”. It points to a link that stores the PowerApps msapp file. With the help of the premium connector HTTP, we will make a GET request to the readonlyValue link (Blob storage path). This step allows you to retrieve the contents of the msapp file which could be stored as a backup file in SharePoint, Onedrive, Github etc. Let’s now look at the data stored in the msapp file, change the extension of the .msapp file to .zip file and open it.

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Assets	All the media files (Images, Videos, Audio)
Controls	Information about all the controls (First Party, Custom components etc) used in the different screens of the app. Data is in JSON format.
References	Information about Datasources, Templates (Label, Gallery, Textbox etc), Resources (Images etc), Themes used in the app etc
Resources	Publish information, user locale etc
Properties.json	Information of the app like Author, PowerApp name, no of screens etc

Add the action “Get App”, enter the App ID of the Power App

This action retrieves all the information of the app including the “readonlyvalue” as explained above. Using this result we will make a GET request using the HTTP connector to retrieve the app data in this Flow.

Add the action “Create file” in OneDrive for Business connector and set the body from HTTP connector. This allows you to save your app to OneDrive for Business. As said earlier you can instead store it to other storage like Azure Blob Storage, SharePoint document library, GitHub etc.

The msapp file is with us now, let’s now restore the PowerApp. Create a Blank app from the Power Apps studio then open the.MSApp file via the File > Open > Browse menu option. This enables you to select an .MSApp file from your local file system then save & publish the App. The app is now back. Let me know on the comment section if there is an automated way to restore the PowerApp from the MSApp file.

In this article, we have seen ways to backup & restore your app & flow using a Flow. If you are an Power App/Power Automate environment admin (Premium license), you could backup all the apps & flow available in the environment using the Apps for Admin connector. There are Power Shell cmdlets available for Admins & creators which could be used for this task. If you have a more complex business application including PowerApps Canvas, multiple flows, custom connector, Model driven apps, entity etc, solutions is recommended. Exporting a solution as a package is very easy by click of a button, restoring is also quite an easy task. Hope you find this article useful, let me know your feedback on the comments section.