How to recover a pipeline configuration from run history?

[robertozsr]

Good morning everyone!

I would greatly appreciate your help with a frustrating situation I've run into.

I was renaming a pipeline while I had one of its Switch Case activities open in the editor. When I saved, it deleted all the other activities and now the pipeline only shows that one Switch Case — all the rest of the logic is gone.

Unfortunately I don't have Git integration enabled on my workspace. However, I do have a successful run history from a couple of days ago when the pipeline was complete. When I navigate to that run, it shows "Pipeline was modified after this run" and I cannot find a way to restore a previous version — unlike Notebooks which have a built-in version history.

My questions are:

1. Is there any way to recover the previous pipeline configuration from the run history?
2. To avoid this kind of disaster in the future, what is the recommended approach — enabling Git integration, regularly exporting the JSON definition, or both?

The pipeline had quite complex logic that took a significant amount of time to build, so any help would be hugely appreciated!

Thank you in advance 🙏

[robertozsr]

Hello guys, I manage to fix it. There was only a bug where it deleted all the conneciton, variables, and parameters setting but the rest was there. Now I will set up a git integration! Thanks!

[tayloramy]

Hi @robertozsr, 

That is a really odd bug. I'd recommend opening a Microsoft support ticket to report it. 

As for restoring, without having any git version control set up, your only option is to re-create it. There is no built in version tracking for pipelines. 

[Olufemi7 · Accepted solution]

 @robertozsr, 
No- you cannot restore a pipeline configuration from run history.

What you can do

• Open a previous successful run in Monitor
• Use the activity run graph to understand execution flow (sequence, branching, conditions)
• Inspect each activity’s Inputs/Outputs to reconstruct:
• Parameters
• Expressions
• Dataset references

 This allows you to manually rebuild the pipeline, but not restore it.

 What is not possible

• No rollback/version restore from run history
• No stored pipeline JSON in monitoring
• Run history only keeps execution metadata, not pipeline definitions

Microsoft Docs (Monitoring pipelines):
Visually monitor Azure Data Factory

 Microsoft Docs (Programmatic monitoring):
Programmatically monitor an Azure Data Factory

 Best practice

• Enable Git integration (e.g., Azure DevOps or GitHub) → version control & rollback
• Export pipeline JSON (ARM template) before major changes → backup

 Summary

Run history supports execution analysis, not version recovery.
 Without Git or backups, the only option is manual reconstruction.

[robertozsr]

Regariding the export of the pipeline, when I do the export, I have tried to import again in a clean new pipeline by clicking the icon import, but when it opens the file explorer the file with extension .json is not visible. Then how to import an exported pipeline?

[robertozsr]

proably in view > edit json code? elimnate what is inside, and past everything insde?