If you find these tutorials useful and would like to link to them from your own pages,please contact the Drew Spatial Data Center Director, Dr. Catherine Riihimaki via email. You are invited to leave comments or ask questions in any of the Comment areas of each tutorial page.

When you move data for a Map Project by copying it or changing its location, the file paths that the map reads for the data become invalid.  ArcMap indicates a broken data link with red exclamation marks next to Map Layers in the Table of Contents.  File paths can be fixed by repairing the Data Source using the following steps.

Repairing Data Sources for Copied or Moved Map Layer Files

  1. Right click on the name of the Map Layer you want to repair.  In the pop-up menu, choose Data → Repair Data Source.  The Data Source dialog box will appear.
  2. In the Look In: menu of the Data Source dialog box, navigate to the folder where the Map Layers for the project are located.  If your Map Project has layers collected in a Geodatabase, navigate to that Geodatabase.   Make sure that you are navigating to the most recent location of the data.  You can repair sources by linking to the original location if you copied files, but it's better to repair data sources to the nearest location from which you will be using it.
  3. Inside the file or Geodatabase, highlight the Map Layer with the same name.  If you did not save a Map Layer as a separate layer file, then highlight the original file - usually an .shp file - from which the Map Layer was created.  If your source was a table, click on the original .xls, .csv, or .dbf  file. 
  4. Click Add.  A warning may appear asking if you really want to change the Data Source.  If this warning appears, it means you've chosen an incorrect Data Source.  Click No and find the original Data Source for your Map Layer.  (If you get this message but are sure that this is the correct source for the file in the new location, click Yes.)
  5. Repeat steps 2 - 4 for all of the files that need Source repair.
  6. Save your Map Project to maintain the repaired Data Sources.
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