# Node-Red Flow Pasting Issues

**URL:** <https://discourse.nodered.org/t/node-red-flow-pasting-issues/11274>\
**Category:** General\
**Created:** [18 May 2019 14:21 UTC](https://discourse.nodered.org/t/node-red-flow-pasting-issues/11274 "2019-05-18T14:21:46Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![scargill](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex026/user_avatar/discourse.nodered.org/scargill/32/1118_2.png) [@scargill](https://discourse.nodered.org/u/scargill)\
**Post date:** [18 May 2019 14:21 UTC](https://discourse.nodered.org/t/node-red-flow-pasting-issues/11274/1 "2019-05-18T14:21:46Z")

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I'm having some terrible issues with FLOW pasting in Node-Red. I'm over in Spain right now for the summer where my Node-Red setup is months old. I could not safely remotely update Node-Red, NPM etc here to the latest versions from the UK without chancing the entire Spanish installation. The UK uses a later Node-Red and NPM (10 instead of 8) and updated nodes (both the UK and Spanish versions work just fine normally)..

So I brought over a PI 3 (same as I have here) with my UK setup, renumbering the fixed IP address to a test address here. If I start up the Pi, all is well (but of course set up for UK devices and so not controlling real things yet. But if I delete all my flows and reboot, then start copying my Spanish flows across from the Spanish working setup, I get horrendous flow replication and eventually have to revert to a backup.

For example - the first flow is called INIT and simply does some initilisation of variables. In the newly emptied NR board, I import the nodes from the old Spanish INIT flow....via the clipboard, then rename the new FLOW1 to INIT. That seems to work. I then make a new FLOW1, import the second flow contents. Not only does that paste initially seem to work bar one missing node, but the next thing I know there are dozens of flows called INIT and the whole thing starts to fall apart with nodes sitting on top of other nodes.... has anyone else come across a similar situation? Thank heavens doe rpi-clone.. I revert to a backup made before I started to make changes and all is well, but upgrading the setup here is not looking promising right now.

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**Author:** ![TotallyInformation](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex026/user_avatar/discourse.nodered.org/totallyinformation/32/31_2.png) [@TotallyInformation](https://discourse.nodered.org/u/TotallyInformation)\
**Post date:** [18 May 2019 14:55 UTC](https://discourse.nodered.org/t/node-red-flow-pasting-issues/11274/2 "2019-05-18T14:55:29Z")

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Not seen anything like that Pete.

Can you not simply use the full flow file from your Spanish Pi? Rather than pasting a piece at a time?

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**Author:** ![scargill](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex026/user_avatar/discourse.nodered.org/scargill/32/1118_2.png) [@scargill](https://discourse.nodered.org/u/scargill)\
**Post date:** [18 May 2019 16:01 UTC](https://discourse.nodered.org/t/node-red-flow-pasting-issues/11274/3 "2019-05-18T16:01:49Z")

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You’re right Julian – I guess originally I figured it might be better to do it in stages - I just tried that now and up to now apart from a couple of missing bits it seems fine – thank you for that.