Druva supports disaster recovery for Microsoft Power BI through workspace restore in the Druva Cloud Platform console and a Download-and-Import workflow for manual recovery and data export.

Use automated restore to recover an entire backed-up workspace to a new Power BI workspace. Use download-and-import when you need individual files or prefer a manual recovery path.

Restore a Power BI Workspace

A restore operation recovers a backed-up Power BI workspace by recreating it in a new workspace. During the restore process, you must create a new destination workspace. Restores are performed at the workspace level only and cannot be applied to individual items.

Restore procedure

Navigate to Microsoft Power Platform > Power BI > Configured Workspaces.
Select the workspace that you want to restore, and then click the Backups tab.
Select the required snapshot, and then click Restore.
In the Snapshot Viewer section, select the required recovery point from the Snapshot drop-down list.
Click Restore Full Workspace.
In the confirmation dialog, review the information, and then click Continue.
In the Restore to New Workspace dialog, enter a name in the Enter workspace name field, and then click Restore.
Monitor the restore progress on the Jobs page. For more information, see Monitoring Power Platform Jobs.

📝NOTE: If the Item Type is displayed as Reports (metadata), it indicates that the report is a copy of a report saved in a different workspace. In such cases, the backup operation is still marked as successful, but only the report metadata is backed up. The actual report file is not included in the backup.

Download and Import (Manual Recovery)

You can also download individual backup items from a snapshot and import them manually into Power BI. This workflow is useful when you need specific files or want to recover content outside of a full workspace restore.

📝NOTE:

When downloading items individually, only assets downloaded as .pbix and .rdl files can be imported back into Power BI workspaces. Other assets, such as dashboards, semantic models, apps, and dataflows—are downloaded as JSON files for configuration reference only and cannot be directly imported through the Power BI import workflow.

When you import a PBIX report file in Power BI, the associated assets, such as the semantic model, are automatically recreated in the target workspace.

Compatibility Matrix

Item Type	File Format/Notes	Recovery Method
Dashboards	`JSON` metadata files.	Reference Only. (Must be recreated manually by pinning visuals from restored reports, see Restoring Dashboards).
Semantic Models	`JSON` metadata files	Reference Only.
Dataflows (Gen 1)	`JSON` metadata files	Reference Only.
Apps	`JSON` metadata files	Reference Only.
Reports	Self-contained `.pbix` files	Import Supported. Can be downloaded and imported directly to Power BI workspaces.
Paginated reports	`rdl` file	Import Supported. Can be downloaded and imported directly to Power BI workspaces.

Procedure

To download and manually import individual reports, follow these steps.

Step 1: Download the `.pbix` file from Druva

Navigate to Microsoft Power Platform > Power BI > Configured Workspaces.
Select the target workspace and open the Snapshot Viewer.
Locate the specific Report (.pbix file).
Click Download.

Step 2: Import the file to Power BI

Log in to the Microsoft Power BI Service.
Navigate to the destination workspace.
Select Import> From this computer and upload the downloaded .pbix and .rdl files.

Restoring Dashboards

During an automated workspace restore, Druva creates dashboard shells and clones supported report tiles where the source tiles still exist. Tiles on standalone dashboards and tiles whose source visuals have been deleted are not restored.

If you use the download workflow, dashboards are backed up as JSON metadata files for reference only. To restore a dashboard manually, recreate it from your imported reports.

Step 1: Download and Import the Report .pbix file

Step 2: Review the Dashboard Metadata

Open the downloaded JSON metadata file associated with your dashboard.
Review the metadata to identify the specific tiles (e.g., "sum of cogs", "sum of sales") that were originally configured on the dashboard.

Recreating Dashboards in Power BI

Open your newly imported report in the Power BI workspace.
Locate the specific visuals (tiles) you identified in the JSON metadata.
Click the Pin visual option on the desired visual.

Select Existing dashboard (or create a new dashboard if pinning the first tile) to sequentially rebuild your original dashboard layout.

Downloading and Restoring Power BI Data