IT Tips & Tricks
Published 16 June 2022
One Essential Data Migration Tool: Three Ways to Use it
The need for data migration has been around for almost as long as data itself, especially with half the business world moving to SharePoint these days. It’s a modern necessity, but one that is still fraught with problems. In fact, Gartner maintains that over 80 percent of migrations fail. Want to increase your odds of success and all the admiration that comes with it? Just eliminate the pitfalls. This article covers a big one: broken links.
One of the most widespread problems with migrations is the data that gets lost, and one of the most common causes of lost data is the file links that get broken during the migration process itself.
LinkFixer Advanced™ allows you to address this problem from three different perspectives so that no matter what stage of the migration process you’re in, there’s a solution to either prevent or automatically restore missing data due to broken links.
Want to increase your odds of success and all the admiration that comes with it?
Defining the Problem
For the sake of clarity, we’ll take a second to define a couple of terms. This should avoid any confusion as we get into more detail.
A parent file is a file that contains one or more links that point to some other file or files.
A child file is a file that is pointed to by a link in a parent file.
A link is defined as the information contained in a parent file that designates the name and location (drive, folder, and so on) of a child file pointed to by the parent file. The link is the data itself (the file name, the file path, and so forth) that tells the computer what child file to display and where to find that child file.
Pre Migration: Safeguard Your Links
If some of your data seems to disappear into a black hole during a migration, protecting your file links would be the smart thing to do.
LinkFixer Advanced safeguards your links so that you can move data, rename it or restructure it — however you want — with immunity to data loss resulting from broken links. It’s a three-step process, and the first is the “Inoculate” process.
In the medical world, “inoculate” means to treat a person (or animal) with a substance that produces immunity to one or more diseases (or at least that’s the intention). When it comes to your data, inoculate means to apply a treatment to your files that essentially makes them immune to the disease of broken links. In medicine, when inoculation works, it doesn’t mean that the person cannot get the disease, but it does mean that the body is already prepared to automatically fight it and kill it fast, often before unwanted symptoms have a chance to appear. When LinkFixer Advanced inoculates your files, first of all, it always works. It treats your files and databases so that whenever any links get broken (which they do, during most types of data migration), they can be swiftly and automatically fixed. No muss, no fuss, no symptoms.
The second step is to conduct your migration, using whatever tools and procedures you like.
Third Step: After your migration is complete, LinkFixer Advanced can automatically re-link everything using the “Cure” process. This automatically updates the parent file links to point to each of the correct child files at their new location. The result is zero missing data due to broken file links.
LinkFixer Advanced as a Migration Tool
Here’s another way you could choose to use LinkFixer Advanced.
Do you need to move batches of parent and child files? LinkFixer Advanced can do just that. In other words, you can use it as your migrator. The “Move/Rename” process allows for the definition of sophisticated rename rules that tell LinkFixer Advanced how to move and/or rename batches of parent files and child files. LinkFixer Advanced automatically updates the links in parent files so that they don’t break, maintaining the connection between parent and child files.
Apply a treatment to your files that essentially makes them immune to the disease of broken links.
Post-Migration Disaster Recovery
What if you’ve already done a migration or a file system restructuring project and have thousands of broken links and missing data? Here’s a third way you could use LinkFixer Advanced.
Sometimes, staying connected is critical. Need a lifebuoy to retrieve your missing data?
The “Modify Links” process fixes your already broken links in batch and faster than anything else in the whole world. It allows you to create rename rules that can change practically any portion of your links in almost any way you can imagine. Using the “Modify Links” process, you can easily modify the content of links contained in batches of parent files. This makes it possible to rapidly bulk fix links that have already been broken in files that have been moved, folders that were renamed, or even server names that were changed. With the links repaired, any associated missing data is obviously instantly restored.
Migrating to SharePoint (or anything for that matter)
LinkFixer Advanced can be used to move files into SharePoint while maintaining the integrity of the file links automatically. There are two ways to move files into SharePoint while preserving the links contained within the files. You could do this using either the “Move/Rename” or “Inoculate/Cure” processes mentioned above.
Like “Inoculate/Cure,” using the “Move/Rename” feature of LinkFixer Advanced as your primary migration tool to move files to SharePoint will automatically protect the links during the migration of the files. Moving the files and fixing the links in the files is accomplished in an automated two-step process.
If, however, you prefer to use some other utility to migrate files into SharePoint, you can use the “Inoculate” process before the migration to prepare and protect the links. Then, after the migration, run the “Cure” process to automatically repair all your links.
If you have any questions, please feel free to call us at 727-442-1822 to speak with a friendly Service Consultant. Alternatively, visit us at LinkTek.com where you can also download a free no-credit-card-required trial.
Imagine zero missing data due to broken file links.
No matter where you’re migrating to or from, our goal is to help you get there without the usual broken links and resultant missing data.
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