How to check if a file has not been updated

[Joxe]

Hello there,

I would really appreciate if someone could help me. My problem is the following:

First of all, I have a process that every 5 minutes updates the content of two excel files that I have in the same Onedrive folder. But this process fails sometimes, and I need to check when it has not updated the files.

To perform this check I want to use Power Automate Desktop. I want to create a flow that every time I run it checks if the update date-time of the files is more than 10 minutes earlier than the current one. And if that condition occurs (that is, only if the date-time of the files is 10 minutes older than the current one), Power Automate should send me an email notification.

That is the important part of what I want to do.

Then I will insert that flow into a loop, adding before the end of the loop a pause of approximately 9min50ss, and thus the loop will repeat itself more or less every 10 minutes. And if I program it to loop about 4,500 times, it will be enough for me to check it once a month to reset the counter back to 4,500.

My problem is, for one thing, I don't know how to tell Power Automate Desktop how to check the last modified date-time of a file. I have tried "Get Files in Folder" and "Set variable" but no success. I clarify that this could be done by checking the date-time of the files in the computer folder or in Onedrive's cloud service.

On the other hand, I also don't know how to tell Power Automate Desktop to compare that date-time with the current one. In this case I think I have found information to do it with Power Automate cloud flows, but not with the Desktop version.

Just in case I indicate that I have OneDrive configured with the Paris time, as well as the computer. I'm saying this because I also don't know if it is necessary to tell Power Automate to take the time zone into account.

And finally, if it's easier, I have no problem checking only one of the two files, because when the update process fails, it fails both. On the other hand, if it's convenient, I could also store each file in different folders.

Thank you very much for your help.

[MichaelAnnis · Accepted solution]

Files have the property "LastModified".  So, you can do this:

The biggest issue was that the If command will not compare Dates/Times, so you have to convert the DateTimes to text -> standard format -> sortable.  This gives them a numeric value that can be compared.

Best of luck!

[Joxe]

MichaeI, a very clear proposal.

I had to change your flow a bit, because the Subtract Dates step was not working for me. I have done it like this:

Thank you very much!

Joxe