Skip to main content
Archive flows you no longer use to remove them from the default views without deleting their run history. You can archive flows yourself or use workspace policies to archive dormant flows and restore flows that run again. You need permission to manage flows (manage_flows) to archive or unarchive them. To configure workspace policies, you also need permission to manage automations.

​
Archive a flow

  1. Open Flows in your workspace.
  2. Open the flow’s action menu, either in its list row or on its detail page, and select Archive.
  3. Review the confirmation and select Archive.
An archived flow does not appear in the default view of the Flows page. Its deployments do not appear in the default view of the Deployments page, and they are labeled Archived. Search, the command palette, and the flow pickers still return the flow, with an Archived label. Runs of an archived flow also show the label. Favorited flows stay in Favorites, including archived flows.

​
Flows with schedules that are on

Prefect Cloud does not archive a flow while one of its deployments has a schedule that is on. The confirmation lists those deployments, with links to their schedules.
  • If you can edit those deployments, the confirmation offers Pause and archive. This pauses the deployments and then archives the flow.
  • Otherwise, pause the deployments or turn their schedules off, then archive the flow.
Unarchiving the flow does not resume the deployments. Resume them yourself when you want their schedules to run again.

​
What archiving changes

Archiving never deletes run history. Your plan’s normal retention policy still applies.
Archiving deletes the flow’s runs that its deployment schedules created and that have not started yet, including late runs. Pausing a deployment deletes the same runs. Runs that you scheduled yourself, and runs that have already started, are not changed. Archiving does not cancel runs, and it leaves the flow’s deployments as they are.

​
Automations that run the flow’s deployments

If an automation runs one of the flow’s deployments, the confirmation names the deployment and links to the automations. Archiving does not stop these runs. With archived flow restoration on, the next run unarchives the flow.

​
Find archived flows and deployments

The Flows and Deployments pages have All and Favorites tabs. On the All tab, open the menu beside the tabs to choose a view:
  • Unarchived (the default) hides archived flows and their deployments.
  • All shows archived and unarchived items.
  • Archived shows only archived items.
The menu button is highlighted while you are not in the default view. When a search also matches archived items, select Show archived results to include them.

​
Restore a flow

Open the flow’s action menu and select Unarchive. You can unarchive a flow from its list row in the Archived or All view, or from its detail page. The flow and its deployments return to the default views. Unarchiving does not resume paused deployments or turn schedules back on.

​
Archive or restore multiple flows

  1. Open Flows and select the flows you want to change. Select all to include every flow that matches the current view and search.
  2. Select Archive selected flows or Unarchive selected flows.
  3. Review the confirmation and the result.
When you archive several flows, the confirmation lists the flows whose deployments have schedules that are on. If you can edit those deployments, select Pause and archive to pause them and archive every selected flow. Otherwise, Prefect Cloud archives the other selected flows and leaves those flows unarchived.

​
Run an archived flow

What happens when you start a run of an archived flow depends on archived flow restoration:
  • Restoration on: the run dialog warns that the flow is archived. The run starts, and the flow is unarchived.
  • Restoration off: the Prefect Cloud UI does not start a run of an archived flow. Unarchive the flow first, or turn on archived flow restoration.
Automations, the API, and the Prefect CLI and SDK can still start runs of an archived flow. With restoration off, the flow stays archived when these runs start.

​
Enable automatic archival and restoration

Prefect Cloud provides two policies that create automations for flow archival. Both policies are off by default, and you can enable them independently in each workspace.
  1. Open the workspace menu in the upper left and select Settings.
  2. Under Account Settings → Controls, make sure Workspace policies is enabled. If you cannot change this setting, ask an account administrator.
  3. Under Workspace Settings → Policies, enable Dormant flow archival, Archived flow restoration, or both.
  4. For Dormant flow archival, set the number of days without runs and select Save after changing the setting.
Automations created by enabled policies appear in the Workspace policies section of the workspace’s automations list. Enabling workspace policies in account controls alone does not turn on either policy for a workspace.

​
Archive dormant flows

Dormant flow archival archives flows that have had no runs for the configured window. The default is 90 days, and you can set a value from 1 to 365 days (inactive_days in the API). Prefect Cloud uses the shorter of that window and your plan’s run retention. For example, a 90-day setting on a plan with 30-day run retention uses a 30-day window. The settings page shows your plan’s retention. A flow is eligible when all of the following are true:
  • It is not already archived.
  • It has not been created or updated within the window.
  • It has no recent runs and no unfinished runs, including scheduled, pending, running, or paused runs.
  • None of its deployments has a schedule that is on.
  • None of its deployments was created or updated within the window.
  • No enabled automation runs one of its deployments through a Run a deployment action that selects that deployment.
Run activity uses the run’s start time, or its expected start time if it has not started. A flow that has never run must still be older than the window. Manually unarchiving a flow updates it, giving it a full window before it can be archived again. Some runs cannot be predicted from the workspace’s configuration. Examples are runs started from another flow, from an external system through the API, or by an automation that infers the deployment from its triggering event. Turn on archived flow restoration so that these flows come back when they run. Prefect Cloud checks daily and processes up to 50 eligible flows per workspace, spread across the day. Archival is gradual: a large backlog can take several days to clear. Each eligible flow produces a prefect.flow.dormant event, which triggers the archive action. The flow is checked again before the event is emitted.

​
Restore archived flows when they run again

Archived flow restoration unarchives a flow when Prefect Cloud observes a Scheduled, Pending, or Running flow-run event whose related flow is archived. This applies to flows archived manually as well as those archived by an automation. There are no settings beyond enabling or disabling it. Restoration can happen when a run is scheduled, before execution starts. If you resume a deployment schedule for an archived flow, that schedule can create runs; with restoration enabled, its next run restores the flow. With restoration disabled, the flow stays archived even if you run it again. The automation groups matching events by flow within a 10-minute window to avoid repeated restoration actions during a burst of runs. It reacts to the first matching event; the window does not add a 10-minute delay. It matches the event names above, so custom state names do not match unless the run also emits one of those events.

​
Turn off a policy

Turn off either policy under Workspace Settings → Policies. Turning off dormant flow archival leaves already archived flows archived. You can still unarchive them manually or use archived flow restoration.

​
Use archival in your own automations

When creating an automation, choose Archive a flow (archive-flow) or Unarchive a flow (unarchive-flow) as the action. Select a specific flow or infer it from the triggering event’s resource or related resources. An archive action fails if one of the flow’s deployments has a schedule that is on; it does not pause them. Manual, bulk, and automated changes emit the same prefect.flow.archived and prefect.flow.unarchived events. Use them to trigger notifications or other actions regardless of how the change was made. Repeating an archive or unarchive action on a flow already in that state does not emit another event.

​
Filter archived flows through the API

The Prefect Cloud API includes archived flows by default. To select only archived flows, send this body to POST /flows/filter relative to your workspace API URL:
Use false for unarchived flows, or omit archived to include both. The same flow filter works with flow counts and pagination, and as the nested flows filter when querying deployments. Flow responses include archived and archived_at; unarchiving resets archived_at to null. To change a flow’s archived state, use POST /flows/{id}/archive or POST /flows/{id}/unarchive. Both return 204 on success, including when the flow is already in the requested state. Archiving returns 409 while one of the flow’s deployments has a schedule that is on; the API does not pause schedules for you. Archiving deletes the same scheduled runs as archiving in the UI. For bulk changes, use POST /flows/bulk_archive or POST /flows/bulk_unarchive with a nonempty flows filter and a limit from 1 to 50. The response reports per-flow results (ARCHIVED, UNARCHIVED, or BLOCKED), so a blocked flow does not stop the rest of the batch. A BLOCKED result lists the deployments with schedules that are on in scheduled_deployments.

​
Find archival automations with older clients

Use prefect 3.9.0 or later to read automations that contain archive or unarchive actions through the CLI or Python client. This version requires Python 3.11 or later. Older clients omit these automations from prefect automation ls, prefect transfer, and automation lookups such as Automation.read(). Inspecting one can report it as not found, even though it is visible in Prefect Cloud. Upgrade your client and, if needed, Python, or manage the automation in the Cloud UI.