Q: “How do I back up ALL my Flow Versions, not just the latest/active ones?”

A: Time Travel! Use an older version of Salesforce’s Metadata API to access inactive Flow Versions.

Here’s the basic process:

1. Download all Flow Version API Names and their highest Version Numbers
2. Use the results from Step 1 to create a package.xml that requests every Flow Version and specifies API version 43.0
3. Log in to Workbench, specifying “API Version” as “43.0” on login
4. Use Workbench’s “Deploy | Retrieve” command to download all Flow Version XMLs using the package.xml created in Step 2

---

Detailed Steps:

1] Download all Flow Version API Names and their highest Version Numbers.

If you’re using RazorSQL, you can run a single query:

SELECT Id, ApiName, VersionNumber FROM FlowDefinitionView

If you’re not using RazorSQL, only 200 records can be queried at once. You’ll need to grab ’em in chunks of 200, like this:

1a] SELECT Id, ApiName, VersionNumber FROM FlowDefinitionView ORDER BY Id LIMIT 200

1b] SELECT Id, ApiName, VersionNumber FROM FlowDefinitionView WHERE Id > '[200th ID]' ORDER BY Id LIMIT 200

1c] SELECT Id, ApiName, VersionNumber FROM FlowDefinitionView WHERE Id > '[400th ID]' ORDER BY Id LIMIT 200

1*] [etc]

2] Use the results from step 1 to create a package.xml that looks like this:

<Package xmlns="http://soap.sforce.com/2006/04/metadata">
    <types><members>[FlowApiName1]-1</members><name>Flow</name></types>
    <types><members>[FlowApiName1]-2</members><name>Flow</name></types>
    <types><members>[FlowApiName1]-[...]</members><name>Flow</name></types>
    <types><members>[FlowApiName1]-[Y]</members><name>Flow</name></types>
    [...]
    <types><members>[FlowApiNameX]-1</members><name>Flow</name></types>
    <types><members>[FlowApiNameX]-2</members><name>Flow</name></types>
    <types><members>[FlowApiNameX]-[...]</members><name>Flow</name></types>
    <types><members>[FlowApiNameX]-[Y]</members><name>Flow</name></types>
    <version>43.0</version>
</Package>

. . . where [X] is the number of distinct Flows, and [Y] is the number of distinct Flow Versions for a given Flow (this number will vary for each Flow).

3] Log in to Workbench, specifying “API Version” as “43.0” on login

4] Navigate to Deploy|Retrieve,

• specify the package.xml created in Step 2,
• select “Single Package”, and
• click the Next button.

When the metadata job finishes running, download the Zip file. You’re done!

Big big thanks to

• Gearset’s blog post How Flows and Flow Definitions changed with the Salesforce Metadata API v44 and
• Victor Lockwood’s StackExchange post

for pointing me in the right direction.

I really wanna create a proper app that automates all this work, though I fear that’s a copious free time kinda thing 😑