Archiving of Reports Built in Web Across Workspaces

[j_ocean]

If someone creates a report in PBI Service based off of a dataset in the same workspace, then in order to archive the report you can just download the PBIX and store that offline somewhere. This is desirable separation to be able to recover from an accidental deletion in Service, and to provide general clutter management. 

However, if the report is saved to a different workspace you cannot download the PBIX at all. There doesn't appear to be any way to save it offline.

How would one archive such a report? The only thing I can think of is copying it with a version number into a workspace, but this seems like a horrendous mess.

[TomMartens · Accepted solution]

Hey @j_ocean ,

Creating a report inside the Service is something we do not recommend to our users, exactly for the reason you mentioned.

Nevertheless sometimes things happen.

If you want the pbix - there is a clumsy way, if you want to make sure that you have a "copy" of the report to prepare for a desaster like an accidental deletion of the report it's a little bit more simple.

Both scenarios retrieving the pbix from a report created on the web and creating a backup from the report are requiring a Microsoft Fabric capacity or a Premium capacity (with Fabric workloads enabled), as both are relying on the Git-Integration feature. That allows you to synch the content of the workspace with a repo based on azure DevOps (you need a license for Azure DevOps as well).

If the workspace content (here it's the report) is synched with the Azure DevOps repository, you have the backup. If you want the pbix, you can synch the repo to your development machine (on my side it's MacBook running Parallels to have Power BI Desktop). Open the Power BI project in Power BI Desktop and save the file as a pbix.

Hopefully, this provides a new idea.

Regards,

Tom