DEV Community

Max Katz for Okta Workflows

Posted on • Originally published at maxkatz.net on

How to Create Flow or Folder Backup and Save It to Google Drive

Okta Workflows how-to guides are questions and answers from weekly community office hours, MacAdmins Workflows Slack channel, and other places.

Read all previous how-to guides ⤵️

On to the question.

How to create flow or folder backup and save it to Google Drive?

Workflows has two cards to help with backing a flow or a folder:

  • Flows – Export Flow
  • Folders – Export Folder

Both cards work in similar way. The Flows – Export Flow card creates a backup for a particular flow, and the Folders – Export Folder card creates a backup a folder with one or more flows.

Here is an example of a flow that uses Export Folder to create a backup of a folder and upload it to Google Drive. The flow is schedule to run every Monday at 9 AM.

Folder backup to Google Drive

Folder backup to Google Drive

The flow has the following steps:

  1. Run the flow on a schedule ( Schedule Flow )
  2. Folders – Export Folder card creates a backup of a selected folder
  3. You want to have a unique name for each backup. The Date & Time – Now cards returns the current time
  4. Using the backup file name and the current time, the Text – Concatenate card creates a unique file name
  5. The last step is to upload the file to Google Drive using Google Drive – Upload File card. Parent folder ID is specified in order to upload the file to a specific folder

Flow backup looks almost identical. The only change is the flow is now using Flows – Export Flow to backup a particular flow.

Flow backup to Google Drive

Flow backup to Google Drive

Google Drive folder looks like this after running folder back and flow backup one time.

Google Drive folder

Google Drive folder

I also recorded two short videos that show how these flows work:

📺 How to Create a Flow Backup and Save It to Google Drive

📺 How to Create a Folder Backup and Save It to Google Drive

You can also backup a flow to GitHub. Check out Versioning for Flows and Folders with Github template to learn more.


💎 Read all other Okta Workflows How-To Guides.

📒 Have a question about Okta Workflows? Join the weekly community office hours to get help.

Top comments (0)