A lot of the work that comes across my bench arrives the same way. Someone’s parent died, the family is clearing out the house, and there’s a computer in the office or a dusty external drive in a closet. Nobody knows the password. Nobody knows if it still works. And there are twenty years of photographs on it that exist nowhere else.
If that’s where you are: I’m sorry. Here’s what actually helps.
First, the good news about passwords
A Windows or macOS login password is not a barrier to getting files off a drive, as long as the drive itself isn’t encrypted. The password protects the operating system, not the data. Pull the drive, connect it to another machine, and the files are readable.
So don’t spend an evening guessing passwords. It rarely works and it can actively hurt you — repeated failed attempts on some setups trigger lockouts or push the machine into a recovery mode that’s harder to work with than where you started.
The thing that is a barrier: encryption
This is the part worth checking before anything else, because it determines whether this is easy or nearly impossible.
FileVault on Mac. Standard on most Macs from roughly 2018 onward, and often enabled during initial setup without the owner really registering it. Any Mac with a T2 chip or Apple silicon — that’s essentially every Mac since 2018 — encrypts the internal storage at the hardware level regardless.
BitLocker on Windows. Increasingly enabled by default on newer machines, especially those signed into a Microsoft account.
Without the password or the recovery key, encrypted data is not recoverable. Not by me, not by a bigger lab, not by anyone. That’s not a limitation of equipment — it’s what encryption is for. I’d rather tell you that plainly now than take your drive and your money first.
Where the key might be, though — check all of these:
- Their Microsoft account (BitLocker keys are often stored there automatically, at account.microsoft.com under Devices)
- Their iCloud account, if FileVault was set to allow iCloud recovery
- A printout in a filing cabinet or safe deposit box — people of a certain generation wrote these down
- A password manager, if they used one
- The estate paperwork. More attorneys are including digital access provisions now.
If a family member has legal authority over the estate, Apple and Microsoft both have formal processes for account access requests. They’re slow and paperwork-heavy, but they exist.
Free evaluation. No data, no charge.
Older machines are usually the easy case
Here’s the quiet upside: the computers most likely to hold irreplaceable family photos are often old enough to predate default encryption.
A desktop from 2009 with a spinning IDE or early SATA drive has no encryption at all. The password is irrelevant. If the drive still spins, this is a straightforward job — and even if it doesn’t, unencrypted platters are recoverable in ways encrypted ones never are.
Old drives that have sat unpowered in a closet for a decade come with their own issues — stiction, where the heads stick to the platters, and degraded lubricant are both real — but those are mechanical problems with mechanical answers, not locked doors.
What to do with the machine
- Don’t power it on repeatedly. If the drive is old or was failing before they passed, each power cycle is a risk. One attempt to see if it boots is reasonable. Ten is not.
- Don’t let a repair shop “wipe and refurbish” it. This happens more than you’d think when families hand over a machine without saying what they want from it.
- Don’t throw out the old externals. The backup drive in the closet may be in better shape than the computer, and it’s often where the photo library actually lived.
- Bring the whole computer if you’re local. You don’t need to pull the drive yourself. Drop-off in Pittsburgh is fine, and so is shipping the whole laptop.
How I handle these
Honestly, and without a sales pitch, because I’ve been on the other side of one of these calls.
Evaluation is free. If the drive is healthy and unencrypted, I’ll tell you it’s a simple job and quote it low — sometimes it’s simple enough that I’ll just tell you how to do it yourself. If it’s encrypted with no key, I’ll tell you that on day one and not charge you for the disappointment. If the drive has failed mechanically, you get a real quote and the real odds before anything starts.
And if there’s nothing there — sometimes the photos were all on a phone, or the drive is genuinely gone — you’ll hear that from me too.
The bottom line
Login passwords aren’t the obstacle; encryption is. Check for a recovery key before you assume the worst, and check the old external drives before you assume the computer is the only copy. Older machines are usually the recoverable ones, which is lucky, because they’re usually the ones with the photographs.
Working through a parent’s machine? Start a case — tell me roughly what year the computer is from and whether you know if a password was set. Those two facts tell me most of what I need to know.