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Existing flow to just copy Sharepoint folders is taking 30+ minutes per step

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Posted on by katiep23

We have a flow to create a project folder in Sharepoint & then copy a series of 5 relatively empty folders as a template. For the last 6 months, this ran fine & took less than a minute per step. Now each step is taking > 30 minutes & the whole process can take over 3 hours to complete. No idea what could be happening 😣. Thanks for any help!

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duvzwingz on at

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Hi @katiep23, I came here to complain about the exact same thing! Except, my empty folders are taking 3 mins each to copy over, which is still unacceptable. I was able to utilize Copy Folder at the parent folder level successfully (<1 min to copy parent + all folder contents), however, I don't want to include the parent folder when copying over, only its contents.

So I landed on this, telling the flow to do multiple copies (of each subfolder). This is what's taking way too long.

Hoping to see a helpful response on this topic!

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clu1 3 on at

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am experiencing the same slow issue with the "copy folder" action of sharepoint in power automate. it takes very long time to copy the folder that has no files (likely until it gets time-out) but it does normal if copying the folder that has files inside. can someone please help? thank you

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warwolf7 11 on at

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In our case, sometimes it takes 8sec to complete the entire flow to copy a folder containing multiples folders. Sometimes it takes over 30min... That is quite annoying

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warwolf7 11 on at

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It seems to happens after a failure. For example, a folder with the same name exist then the copy folder will take forever to execute. Then for the subsequent run, it will take forever. If I cancel it, it simply won't run until xxminute and will get the error
"status": 400,
"message": "The source folder 'file location' is already part of another copy/move operation\r\nclientRequestId: "
this errors keeps happenning a while (likely 30minutes)
Then, after that it will be fine and fast again. That makes no sense to me. It is driving me nuts. If anyone has any idea

retry is set to fixed interval, count : 3, interval PT15S

I added an action timeout of PT1M30S

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I think that the copy folder can get stuck if the previous copy folder failed because I believe the folder stays "locked" and is in a queue waiting to be copied or something.
This should not happens. If the copy folder fails because a folder with the same name already exist, then, it should exit the copy/move operation queue

The solution would be to validate that a folder with the same name doesn't already exist, of course. but in case of error, you are screwed for a while

---edit
Even when it succeed, it might still take forever on the next run. This makes no sense. The last runs I got that is only for the copy folder action(the folder contains 7 empty subfolders and thats it)

feb21rst 2024
41minutes (the rest of the flow takes 2seconds)
04minutes (the rest of the flow takes 2seconds)
2hr08minutes
1hr07minutes
1h28minutes
feb22 2024
0minutes 19sec... (0.2% of the time of the longest run yesterday) just why?
something is very wrong here.

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warwolf7 11 on at

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Adding to this, whenever the "copy Folder" action is running, in sharepoint, no user can manually copy folder. When the flow copy folder action is running for 4 hours, all of our users are stuck and can't copy folder on sharepoint online for 4 hours. Something has to be fixed in that flow action.

on feb28, the copy folder action took more than 4 hours, I had to cancel it. But it took several hours more before it unlock the copy function on sharepoint online.

Do you have the same issue?

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