Power Automate Desktop (PAD) Best Practices: Part 4 - Updating PAD

To be honest, I have never updated my PAD. While some of the new actions may be interesting, updating your environment can be detrimental to your current flows.

A little back story. I came to PAD specifically because of this issue with another RPA developer. The RPA developer pushed down (forced) a lab update that completely destroyed all of my bots, and it could not be undone. everything that I had made for the 6 months prior, they wanted me to recreate. Every flow had to be gone into and files get moved around to point at a different place, and it was chaos. It 100% defeated the purpose of automation which is to save time. I have never had that problem with PAD, and it is mainly because I have never updated my PAD (I am still on 2.8), but I understand the struggle of having bots fail after an update.

Throughout the user community I have seen several posts of users struggling with the 2.14 update destroying flows that worked just fine before the update. Since this was such a common post that I saw, I thought I would leave, what I believe, the best way to protect yourself, your time, and your flows from such an incident, as time consuming as it may be.

1. Turn auto updates off - this puts updates in your control.
2. Get your flows to a different test workstation. Here is a quick YouTube on using Solutions to move flows that I will cover in another topic.
3. Before updating the test workstation, make a copy of the install file for its current version, it can typically be located here:??C:\Program Files (x86)\Power Automate Desktop - search for the word install.?
4. There should only be one install file.?Save this file somewhere safe outside of this folder. This allows you to undo the latest install and go back to a working update if something goes horribly wrong like 2.14.
5. Update that workstation and test your flows there
6. This way, your workstation continues to work (on the previous version) and you can troubleshoot flows that don't work on your test workstation.
7. Once you have fixed all issues on the flows in the test workstation:

• Before updating your workstation, make a copy of the install file for your current version.?This allows you to undo the latest install and go back to a working update if something goes horribly wrong like 2.14.
• Update your workstation
• Copy the flows from the test workstation to your workstation using the same Solutions method you used the first time.

Now all your new flows, having been tested/updated on the test workstation should be up and running flawlessly on your workstation.

While this seems cumbersome, always having a working environment of your current flows is going to save so many headaches from the alternative, and relieve the stress of not having to wonder if this next update is going to be the one that undoes hours of work and causes you to miss your deadlines.

Michael Annis has no affiliation with Microsoft or its subsidiaries.?The “Best Practices” are purely compilations of his opinion and observations of conversations on the Power Automate Desktop User Community; an individual’s use of them should be taken as such.?Michael Annis has been using Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for over 2 years and maintains a “Top Solution Author” position on the Microsoft Power Automate Desktop User Community standings.?The best place for users to get their questions answered is through the User Community located here:?https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Automate-Desktop/bd-p/MPADesktop.