LinkFixer Advanced: Making You the Hero of Data Migration

Published 30 April 2015

Over the years, I’ve collected up some pretty gnarly tales of data migrations. But the really great part is what they do to handle the gnarly migrations. That’s what I love, anyway. Here are a few of my favorite examples:

Worcestershire County Council in the UK was doing a migration in which they completely changed up the folder naming conventions. It wasn’t just a simple change of drive letter, and it was quite a process. Links were a mix of simple cell references to other spreadsheets, cell references in complex formulas, references in data names, pivot tables and VBA. There were also data connections to some Access databases. (Phew!) Needless to say, their work was cut out for them! Here’s how they solved it, using LinkTek’s LinkFixer Advanced:

We used the software to analyze the file structure and find all links before the migration and to fix broken links where needed before any changes were made to the file structures. I was also able to analyze file structures and fix links for other departments on behalf of our IT department, who had not found any alternative automated methods of checking and fixing links to help with the migration. The IT department was impressed with the speed, accuracy and ease of LinkFixer. I again recently used the software when someone decided to move a load of files without thinking to tell anyone else. Again the software solved the problem in minutes. This software is definitely in my armory of IT tools!

Andy Warner — Waste Management — Worcestershire County Council UK

The State of Vermont government IT office did not simply have one migration to do. Oh no, that would have been much too simple. They had a file system migration to do for the Department of Finance and Management. This one had one particular directory tree that had about… oh, maybe… 500,000 links in several thousand spreadsheets that were linked to files throughout tree. When performing this migration, their intent was to homogenize the directory naming conventions as well as collapse multiple trees (including the one with all of the links) into a single contiguous tree. They quickly realized that by doing this it would break all of these links, but the file system was so disorganized that it needed to be done. Here’s how they used LinkFixer Advanced to save their tails: “LinkFixer made it possible for us to migrate the files, and fix all of the links in the scope of work in a single weekend so that the users were able to return to business as usual the following Monday! We haven’t put together a cost comparison, but I am confident in saying that it cost significantly less money to purchase the LinkFixer license and fix the links than to spend several weeks fixing them manually. Thanks so much LinkTek!”

David Fortin — IT Systems Administrator — State of Vermont

Our good friend, Christine from Calgary, Alberta, had a beast of a migration to get done. She had to face the problem of broken links in her migration head on. She said, and I quote, “Broken links can cause high blood pressure.” We definitely reminded her that LinkFixer Advanced is not an FDA approved treatment for high blood pressure… But here’s her story on how she wrestled that data migration (and won): Broken links can cause high blood pressure. Okay, maybe not… maybe it’s just me. But the number one problem we needed a solution for was how to prevent broken links when updating disclosure packages. Each updated package is renamed to reflect the most recent version, with the previous information being brought forward to the next package. Under the new document name, all previous links became broken. LinkFixer proved to be THE solution. We can now carry our information forward without losing any links, then continue linking the new information all within a timely, cost-efficient manner (LinkFixer performs this task in minutes compared to the two to three days it takes to manually re-establish all the previous links). I highly recommend LinkFixer as the number onesolution for addressing the problem of broken links.”