New Workspace Help

[ArchStanton]

I have just created a new Workspace for the new Fiscal Year 2026/27 that begins tomorrow (1st Apr). The existing 2025/26 workspace contains semantic models and their associated report(s). Is there a way I can duplicate the 2025/26 Workspace?

I will switch off the daily refreshes for the existing 2025/26 reports later today as they will be used as a snapshot of the FY.

My plan was to open each pbix file in Desktop and publish them individually into the new Workspace - I was just wondering is there a better way to do this?

Thanks

[v-karpurapud]

Hi @ArchStanton 

Thank you for submitting your question to the Microsoft Fabric Community Forum. Thanks also to @djurecic  and  @djurecic   for providing helpful suggestions.

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[djurecic]

I agree with @ibarrau , what you are describing is not a normal practice. 

[ibarrau]

Hi. Well... depending on the requirements we could suggest. The first thing that I can think is why it's not a single semantic model. Will your data source change for last year? if not, then why duplicating. If the data source won't show last ear again or something like that, you may want to consider a middle storage like a warehouse to work in a data structure with snapshots in there instead of power bi. That way you can work with a single Power Bi knowing our data is in the correct place or state at a DB.

If you just want to keep a report to work with current year for user experience, then users usually work in two reports. The one with the current period and another historic one with all of them. That way you only need to maintain two.

Regarding deployment, creating a workspace by year won't scale. You could work with a single workspace and publish a Power Bi App with the current report. Just duplicate the report in your local (save pbix as) and publish in  the same workspace. Edit the app to hide the old one and show the current one and update the app. Users would use the app to see. You can also share both of the with specific audiences. Apps will let you share by audiences depending what they need to see.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/explore-reports/end-user-apps

I would continue in creating workspace, but it you just want to do it that way, you can use the rest api. You need coding skills. But you can set the api like this:

https://blog.ladataweb.com.ar/post/740398550344728576/seteo-powerbi-rest-api-por-primera-vez

Then run this:

https://blog.ladataweb.com.ar/post/697833112208539648/simplepbipython-copiar-pbix-entre-áreas-de

I hope that make sense

[ArchStanton]

Thanks for your reply, unfortunately a lot of that has gone way over my head. 
My system has worked for several years, I inherited 2 PowerBI reports that are connected to a live Dynamics 365 system and I figured the only way of preserving (keeping a snapshot) of the stats & figures at Year End was to create a new Workspace for the new year and publish those pbix files into them (after making some changes to measures and page filters etc).
Once that is done, the old workspace is disconnected, by that I mean the scheduled refreshes are turned off for good, this way anyone can go into 2022 & beyond and take a look at the historial snapshot figures.

The only reason why I posted this question today was to see if I could just duplicate the Workspace and its contents but it looks like I can't.

At the moment it isn't broke so there is nothing to fix but we may need a developer to come in sometime to help with doing things as best practice going forwards.

Thannks

[ibarrau · Accepted solution]

In case you can't change anything, the solution would be the one I have said at the end. You need to code your copy report from one workspace to another. The first time might take time, but the second should just be changing the workspace id and run it.

I guess the effort of just publish the report to a new workspace and duplicate the pbix is not that much as coding a script for running that copy.

I hope that helps,

[ArchStanton]

Thank you, I will look at doing this when we can get someone in to do the coding.