I thought there was a warning that deleting a file would create an orphan link. I’m finding links to nowhere where recent files have been deleted. I delete notes that are no longer in use and don’t mind cleaning up inbound references.
Did I click a setting to turn this off, or is Obsidian no longer doing this? I only delete files in the vault when working out of Obsidian. I shouldn’t be seeing so many orphan references. When I find one, I use VsCode to purge the [[deleted file]] reference.
In Settings → Files and Links → Confirm file deletion
Do you have that turned off? If it’s turned off, you won’t get any warning, whether there are links or not.
It could be an interesting feature request or plugin idea to only warn when there are inbound links.
I always leave that popup warning turned on, so I don’t accidentally delete a file without noticing. And that works for me, because I don’t delete many files.
As for finding the broken links, there are a couple plugins (I’ve never tried): “Find orphaned files and broken links”, “Dangling links”.