IT Tips & Tricks
Broken English: What Broken Links Do to Your Data After a Migration
Published 4 September 2026
A quick note before you start reading: If something in this article looks crazy, broken or just plain wrong, hover over it with your mouse. It’ll make more sense.
A file migration can appear to go exactly according to plan. The folders are there. The documents open. The permissions look right. The new environment is live. Perfection, right?
Then someone clicks a link ...
We regularly hear from IT teams that didn’t account for the file links buried in their data before a migration. When did they remember? When the migration was complete and the users and execs were decidedly not happy with the outcome.
A migration plan that looked successful can start creating trouble in the real world.
Thefi lesar ethe re. Thelin ksareb ro ken.
That’s where a migration plan that looked successful can start creating trouble in the real world.
A File Is Rarely Just a File
Business data is full of connections. Excel™ workbooks may pull in data from other workbooks. Word documents may point to supporting PDFs. Engineering files may reference drawings stored elsewhere. Presentations may link to images, reports or project documents.
One broken link is annoying. A few thousand of them can seriously affect how people work (not in a good way).
Most users never think about those relationships when everything works. They click a link and find what they need or see all the data they expect to see in every file, taking it all for granted. But that changes quickly when links no longer point to the correct files.
Clic k.Err or.Se arc h.Clic k.Wr ongfi le.Se archag ain.
What used to take a few seconds can turn into a scavenger hunt (not the fun kind) through renamed folders, unfamiliar directories and hundreds of files with names like Final_Report_v7_REALLY_FINAL.xlsx.
One broken link is annoying. A few thousand of them can seriously affect how people work (not in a good way).
Broken Links Create More Work for Everyone
An employee opens a familiar spreadsheet after a migration and one of its links still points to the old location. The file itself is fine. The linked document may also be fine. The problem is simply that the route between them no longer leads to the right place.
So the employee has to search for the target file, figure out which copy is current and confirm that it is actually the document the link used to open. If that fails, they can either keep searching or give up and send the problem to IT, the helpdesk or the migration team.
When users spend time trying to fix broken links, that’s time spent not doing their jobs.
That’s a lot of activity created by something nobody considered part of the employee’s job.
Repeat that across finance workbooks, project folders, technical documentation and years of archived material and the productivity cost becomes harder to dismiss and even harder to quantify. Not because every broken link causes a crisis (some do), but because each one adds an unreported amount of time and friction.
And friction has a habit of spreading.
The Data Can Survive While Usability Doesn’t
This is one of the more frustrating things about broken links after a migration. Nothing necessarily disappeared. Files may have moved from one server to another. A folder structure may have been reorganized. Content may now live in SharePoint, OneDrive or another cloud platform. The data made it to the new destination, but the link still points to where the file used to be.
When links stop working, people try to adapt, and they can get about as crafty as a hungry raccoon.
Theda taisn’ tgo ne.I t’sju sthi dingbe hin dbro kenpa ths.
If the information can’t be reached when it’s needed, the fact that it exists somewhere in the new environment may be of interest to IT, but means little to the users.
Users Will Find Another Way
When links stop working, people try to adapt, and they can get about as crafty as a hungry raccoon.
They search. They download copies. They email documents to one another. They save local versions so that they’ll never have to search for the file again. They create new shortcuts. All perfectly understandable.
But that creates a secondary problem. Suddenly there are extra copies of files and documents sprawled all over the beautiful new structure the migration was supposed to establish. A project intended to make information cleaner and easier to manage can end up encouraging people to work around the new environment instead.
For MSPs and migration consultants, this can be especially uncomfortable. Clients rarely evaluate a migration by admiring the transfer logs. They evaluate it by trying to work on Monday morning.
If the files made the trip but the connections didn’t, the difference between a successful migration and an unsuccessful one can get rather “philosophical.” MSPs and consultants may consider the migration went well, while their clients might disagree.
Broken links are much easier to deal with when they’re treated as part of the migration rather than an unpleasant afterthought.
Search-and-Replace Can Help, Until It Can’t
When broken links appear in large numbers, a search-and-replace tool may seem like an answer. But only if you like solutions that are labor-intensive and frequently don’t work very well. If every old path follows the same pattern and every new destination follows a similarly predictable pattern, replacing one string with another may solve that particular problem. But migrations are seldom that cooperative.
Link repair following a migration is often too complex for a search-and-replace tool to be efficient.
Files may have been split across different destinations. Folder names may have changed. Some content may have been reorganized while other content kept its original structure. Links may use different formats or point to resources that moved in different ways. A broad replacement based on the wrong assumption can simply trade one bad link for another.
Fin dth eol dpa th. Rep lac eit. Ho peitw orks.
The real challenge isn’t changing text inside a path. It’s making sure the link still leads to the actual target. And that requires more than pattern matching, especially when the migration itself involved substantial restructuring or affected tens of thousands of links.
Link Integrity Belongs in the Migration Plan
Broken links are much easier to deal with when they’re treated as part of the migration rather than an unpleasant afterthought.
LinkFixer Advanced is built around that exact problem. It can identify links before a migration, help preserve those relationships while files are moved, and automatically repair broken links in batches after locations have changed.
That shifts the question from “How many files did we move?” to something more useful: Can people still use their data the way they did before?
A migration checklist will naturally cover file counts, permissions, access and destination structure. Link integrity deserves a place alongside those items because the relationships between files are often part of the data’s practical value.
A spreadsheet that opens is good. A spreadsheet that still connects to the information it depends on is even better.
Am igra tionisn tf ini shedun tilth eda taisu sable.
Broken links can be easy to underestimate because, for the users, they may appear one at a time. One error message. One missing reference. One employee asking where something went.
But across a large migration, those small interruptions can accumulate into a mountain of wasted time, extra support work and a growing lack of confidence in the new environment.
Clarity and Simplicity
Success is when everything works as it should.
By now, you’ve probably figured out the reason for the garbled sentences. Some readers will take them as a personal challenge and attempt to figure them out. Others will simply feel frustrated or annoyed by the gobbledygook. And without the ability to hover and reveal the actual sentence, plenty would quit in frustration.
My point is that it’s the same for your users when the links they rely on break during a data migration or simply during normal daily operations.
Moving the files is only part of the job. The connections have to make the trip too. And when nothing’s broken, it’s much better, isn’t it?
By Ed Clark
LinkTek COO
Ed Clark
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