Take a snapshot of data at the start of each month?

[Anonymous]

Is it possible to take a complete snapshot of a table at a point in time. i.e. at the start of each month snapshot how the data looked and then build reports from that data set within BI? Or would I need to export Sharepoint online data to excel or a seperate Sharepoint list each month first?

I used to use SQL Server reporting services to look back in time but I am struggling to do this now in the BI / SharePoint online world.

Any tips and tricks welcome.

[edhans · Accepted solution]

You would need an outside process. Power BI is meant to fully refresh each time @Anonymous and not preserve data. There is a neat trick here that will let you keep one generation of data in the model, but it appears to me to be more of an interesting exercise and side effect of how Incremental Refresh works, but if you ever republish, it wipes out the old data. I would not recommend using this in production. Have another mechanism to snapshot your data, then let Power BI aggregate all of those sources.