how to recover photos from an old hard drive, without making it worse.

almost every family has one. a black external drive with a cable wrapped around it, labeled backup or nothing at all. it was the safe place, once. then it went into a drawer, and the years went by.

no drive lasts forever, and one that has sat unused for a long time isn't a sure thing. so the gentlest way to think about it is this: treat the next time you plug it in as if it might be the last good one. go slowly, copy what matters, and don't ask the drive to do anything it doesn't need to.

first, what kind of drive is it?

• an external drive. a drive in its own case, with a usb cable. the easiest kind: plug it in and look.
• a drive inside an old computer. a laptop or desktop you no longer use. if the computer still turns on, you can copy from it directly. if it doesn't, the drive can usually come out.
• a bare drive. a drive on its own, with no case or cable. it needs an adapter, covered in step 3.

most older drives are spinning hard drives, with moving parts inside. newer ones, and usb sticks, are solid-state, with no moving parts. that matters because spinning drives can wear out mechanically, and they often warn you with sounds.

before you plug it in

• a computer with room to spare. leave at least as much free space as the drive holds, or have a newer external drive ready to copy onto.
• one folder for this drive. name it plainly, like black wd drive or dad's old dell. everything from this drive goes in there, untouched.
• one rule: copy, don't move. don't save anything new onto the old drive, don't delete from it, and don't tidy it. the old drive stays exactly as it is until you have two good copies elsewhere.

and one thing to skip for now: disk repair tools, like check disk on windows or first aid in disk utility on a mac. they can be useful, but they work by writing changes to the drive. copy first, repair later, if ever.

step 1: plug it in once, and listen

connect the drive and pay attention for the first minute. a soft hum or whir as it spins up is normal. so is near silence.

clicking, grinding, beeping, or a drive that spins up and down over and over is not. those sounds usually mean a mechanical problem, and every extra minute with power can make it worse. unplug it and skip ahead to what to do when it clicks or won't spin.

if it sounds fine and shows up on your computer, keep going.

step 2: copy the photos that matter most, first

open the drive and find the folders you care about most before copying everything. on an old windows computer, photos usually live in a folder called pictures or my pictures inside each person's user folder. on an old mac, look in the pictures folder for an iphoto library or photos library. those look like a single file, but they hold every photo inside. copy the whole library, not just what you can see.

also worth a look: folders named dcim copied from cameras, folders named by year, and the desktop, where plenty of photos were dropped and forgotten.

copy whole folders across rather than picking files one by one. if the copy is slow, stalls or shows errors, that's a sign the drive is struggling. stop, copy the single most important folder on its own, then the next. a partial copy of what matters beats a full copy that never finishes.

once the important folders are safe, copy everything else. drives that held photos often hold other things worth keeping too: old videos, scanned letters, voice recordings.

step 3: getting a drive out of an old computer

if the old computer still turns on, the simplest path is to copy from it onto an external drive or a usb stick, then carry that over.

if it won't turn on, the drive inside is often fine. with the computer unplugged, the drive can usually be removed, and read with an inexpensive adapter:

• most laptop drives are 2.5-inch sata drives. a simple sata-to-usb cable reads them.
• most desktop drives are 3.5-inch sata drives. they need an adapter or dock that comes with its own power supply.
• drives from the early 2000s and before often use an older, wider connector called ide. those need an adapter that supports ide.

if opening a computer isn't something you want to do, a local computer repair shop can take the drive out and copy it for you. ask them to copy it, not repair it.

step 4: when the computer won't read it

sometimes the drive sounds fine but the computer doesn't cooperate. a few common reasons:

• it was set up for a different kind of computer. drives formatted on a mac often don't open on windows without extra software. the easiest fix is to borrow a mac. windows drives usually open on a mac, read-only, which is all you need for copying.
• a message asks you to format or initialize the drive. say no. formatting prepares a drive to be used fresh, which is the opposite of what you want. close the message and try a different computer or a different cable first.
• the drive shows up, but the photos are gone. if files were deleted or the drive's index is damaged, photo recovery software can sometimes still find them. photorec, a free, open-source tool from cgsecurity, scans a drive for photo and video files. always save what it finds onto a different drive, never onto the one you're recovering from. and only use tools like this on a drive that is working mechanically.

what to do when it clicks or won't spin

this is the hard case, so it's worth being plain about it. a drive that clicks, grinds or won't spin usually has a physical problem, and software can't fix that.

• stop powering it. each attempt can do more damage to what's still readable.
• don't open it. the inside of a hard drive is extremely precise, and dust or fingerprints can ruin the surfaces the photos are written on.
• consider a data recovery service. they work on failing drives in controlled clean rooms, and they can often recover a great deal. prices vary widely, so get a quote first, and ask what happens if they can't recover anything.

if that isn't the right step today, label the drive with what you know about it, store it somewhere cool and dry, and look elsewhere in the meantime. some of the same photos may still be in an old email account, a cloud account, a relative's computer, or a cd from a photo shop.

step 5: check the copy, then make a second one

before you put the old drive away for good, open its folder on your computer and look. scroll to the oldest and newest photos and make sure both are there. open a handful from different years: a damaged photo often shows up gray or cut off partway down. play a couple of videos all the way through.

then make a second copy somewhere else. until your photos live in two healthy places, the old drive is still one of the copies, so keep it.

then put it all in order

one drive per sitting is plenty. once each drive has its own folder, safely stored in two places, the next step is bringing everything together by when it happened. if you have old phones to gather too, start with how to get photos off an old phone. then how to organize old digital photos, by when they happened walks through the rest.

where treasure box fits

treasure box is the private life archive we're building for exactly these photos. you bring them in from your browser, it reads the date each one was taken, and it lays them out on one private timeline next to every other drive and phone, so 2009 sits next to 2009 no matter which closet it came from. it tells you when your files are safely stored, and you can take a full copy out anytime.

if that sounds like a better home than a drive in a drawer, see how treasure box works or read our privacy promises.

← more from the blog