IT Tips & Tricks

Published 18 January 2022

Data Migration: Living or Dying, Shawshank Style

shawshank-red-fin

Imagine if you put something really important somewhere, and later discover that it’s no longer there. As an IT guy, you can probably relate. You complete a migration and the next thing you know, you’ve got users up in arms that they can’t find the data they need to do their jobs. Your department is getting bombarded with complaints and your boss is like a ticking timebomb. In the words of The Shawshank Redemption’s great Andy Dufresne, it’s time to either “get busy living, or get busy dying.”

One of the most iconic scenes in Shawshank Redemption is of Red (played by Morgan Freeman) sitting under the oak tree in the corner of a hayfield in Buxton, Maine, reading the letter that Andy had hidden there for him.

And none of it would have happened if the box containing Andy’s letter in that Maine hayfield had been missing.

red

Make sure your linked files stick together like Andy and Red.

It’s a blissful, hopeful, uplifting ending. And none of it would have happened if the box containing Andy’s letter in that Maine hayfield had been missing. Red would have wondered why Andy had sent him on a wild goose chase through the hayfields of Maine, and Andy would have sat down in Mexico, wondering why Red never showed up. It would have been immeasurably sad and a truly crappy ending.

There’s peace of mind in knowing that an object will be where you expect it to be, especially when we’re talking data migrations. This is particularly true with file links. Ask any user who clicks on a link to some valuable data, only to get the curt, “File not found” message. That’s when the IT department gets buried in complaints and the boss starts acting like Shawshank’s callous warden. Well, hopefully, for your sake, not that bad.

The Great Escape (aka Get Out of the Office Earlier)

One of the most pervasive causes of data loss occurs during a data migration when file links get broken. You know the hellish results of that: downtime, crabby end-users, potential revenue loss, and a boss you’d rather avoid by doing two weeks in solitary.

Andy Dufresne needed a rock hammer and twenty years to escape the hell of Shawshank. All you need is LinkFixer Advanced™ — the world’s first patented software that automatically finds and fixes broken links. More importantly, it’s the only application that can preserve links in advance of a migration or file-system reorg.

There’s peace of mind in knowing that an object will be where you expect it to be, especially when we’re talking data migrations.

LinkFixer Advanced also supports today’s most common file types and automatically fixes broken links in batch — in any number of files at a time — while also offering the tools to virtually eliminate this type of risk in the future.

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Your data migration doesn't have to feel like this.

The software itself consists of several automated functions that find, fix and maintain links, as follows:

  1. The “Inoculate” function protects all the links prior to a data migration, preparing them so that they can quickly be auto-repaired when they get broken. Next, having completed your migration, the “Cure” function can automatically fix all the previously prepared broken links, and it does it fast.
  2. If the migration was completed before you had an opportunity to prepare the links, leaving you with thousands (or millions) of broken links, it’s not too late. The “Modify Links” function can fix any links that are broken faster than any other method you could dream up. This process is akin to disaster recovery mode.
  1. Finally, the software also offers a “Move/Rename” function that migrates and renames files and folders while automatically handling your links so that they remain fully working when the migration is complete.

Andy Dufresne had to crawl through 500 yards of unimaginable foulness to escape. Luckily, all you need to do to escape a data loss disaster is visit www.LinkTek.com or speak to a friendly Service Consultant at 727-442-1822 for more information. Freedom smells sweet, doesn’t it? See you in Zihuatanejo.

Andy Dufresne had to crawl through 500 yards of unimaginable foulness to escape. Luckily, you don’t have to.

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