Fixing Broken Data Links
Using a project folder and organizing your layers within it can help maintain data links. Still, moving files, renaming files, or opening a project on a different computer can cause data links to break.
Included in this tutorial:
Identifying a Broken Link
Repairing Broken Links
Software version in examples: QGIS-LTR 3.44.10-Solothurn
Tutorial Data: The tutorial includes demonstration with sample data available here.
Credits: Sally Kaye and L. Meisterlin (2026)
Identifying a Broken Link
When you try to open an existing project with one or more broken data links, QGIS will open the Handle Unavailable Layers dialogue, with information on broken layer name(s) and type. To proceed to fixing links, click Keep Unavailable Layers.
layers with broken links are listed in the Handle Unavailable Layers window
A red “warning” exclamation icon next to the layer name indicates a layer with a broken data link. Broken layers are also not visible in the map canvas, even if they are checked as visible in the Layers Pane.
In this example, both “Blocks” and “Tracts” (from the sample data package) are broken links and do not appear in the map canvas.
red warning icons indicate broken data links in the Layers Pane
Repairing Links
To open the Repair Data Source dialogue box, click one of the warning symbols next to the layer name in the Layers Pane. Alternatively, access the Repair Data Source dialogue box by right-clicking the layer name and clicking Repair Data Source. Here, navigate through files to find the new location of the file associated with the broken layer link. Select the correct file name and click OK to repair the link.
In the example below, the “StandardDataPackage 2” geodatabase has been moved from the “SampleData” folder to the “SampleData2” folder. To fix it, we click the warning symbol next to the “Blocks” layer, navigate to the new geodatabase location within SampleData2, and select Blocks.shp to repair the connection.
repairing a broken data link
When repairing one link with this method, all other broken links whose files are in the same new location will also be repaired. Note that the Tracts layer data link has also been repaired, because it is in the same StandardDataPackage 2 folder.