Blob Storage Cold-Archive Lifecycle Mover

Overview

The Blob Storage Cold-Archive Lifecycle Mover is a scheduled Power Automate cloud flow that implements a business-owned, auditable blob-storage lifecycle policy. On a daily recurrence it lists every blob in a configured Azure Blob Storage source folder, finds any whose LastModified date is older than a configurable age threshold, copies each aged blob to a long-term cold-archive path, deletes the original (completing a move), writes a per-run HTML manifest to SharePoint as the audit trail, and emails a summary of files archived and bytes reclaimed. Why it matters: Azure's native blob lifecycle-management rules run silently server-side. This flow makes archival visible, logged, and business-owned - every move is recorded in a timestamped SharePoint manifest and surfaced in a summary email, so cleanup decisions are defensible and reversible. A guid() correlation id is stamped on both the manifest and the email so each run is traceable end-to-end. Ships Off (Stopped); going live requires only authorizing the three connections and setting the environment-variable values.

Use Case

Operations and IT teams with a landing-zone container (report drops, export dumps, scan output, rotating logs) want files older than N days moved to cheaper cold storage and out of the working set - without losing the paper trail of what moved, where, and when. Native Azure lifecycle rules do this invisibly; this flow does it on a schedule the business controls, with a SharePoint audit manifest and an email receipt for every run.

Flow Architecture

Environment Variables

Connectors & Connections

Connector	API name	Actions used
Azure Blob Storage	shared_azureblob	ListFolder_V4 CopyFile_V2 DeleteFile_V2
SharePoint	shared_sharepointonline	CreateFile
Office 365 Outlook	shared_office365	SendEmailV2

Note — All connections are referenced as solution connection references; the flow is portable between environments as long as a connection is mapped at import time.

Customization Guide

Almost every realistic variant of this flow can be implemented by changing environment variable values. A few cases require small edits inside the flow definition — those are called out explicitly below.

Schedule

Change the Recurrence Daily Archive Scan frequency/interval (e.g., weekly off-hours) to match your retention cadence.

Age threshold

Adjust flowlibs_ArchiveAgeThresholdDays; the flow defaults to 90 days if the value is blank.

Access tier

The Blob connector has no SetBlobTier operation, so tiering here is a folder/container move. To force Cool/Archive tier, set the destination container default tier, or add an ARM/HTTP Set Blob Tier call after the copy.

Selective filtering

Add criteria to the Filter Aged Blobs Query (e.g., name prefix or extension) to archive only matching files.

Structured log instead of a manifest file

This flow logs via SharePoint CreateFile (a timestamped HTML manifest in a library). To log into a structured list instead, point Create Archive Log File at an existing list with CreateItem/PostItem.

Recursion

ListFolder_V4 lists one folder level. To mirror nested folders, iterate the returned folder items (IsFolder = true) and list each subfolder.

Key Expressions

The flow is intentionally light on Power Fx / WDL gymnastics — the heaviest expressions are the branch-name concatenation and the approval outcome check. They are listed below in the order they appear in the flow.

int(div(sub(ticks(utcNow()), ticks(item()?['LastModified'])), 864000000000))

@and(not(item()?['IsFolder']), greater(int(div(sub(ticks(utcNow()), ticks(item()?['LastModified'])), 864000000000)), variables('varAgeThresholdDays')))

@concat(variables('varDestinationPath'), '/', items('For_Each_Aged_Blob')?['Name'])

@concat('cold-archive-log-', formatDateTime(utcNow(), 'yyyyMMdd-HHmmss'), '.html')

Customize & download