When you’re cleaning out a parent’s or grandparent’s home after they pass, you find things in drawers and closets that you didn’t know existed. Old floppy disks are one of them — sometimes labelled, sometimes not, often sitting in the same desk drawer since the late 1990s.
Those disks may contain documents, photos, and correspondence that no longer exist anywhere else. This is a common job for me, and it’s worth talking about what to expect.
What people typically find
The floppy disk era — roughly 1990 to 2003 — overlaps with the period when personal computers became household items but before cloud storage and large hard drives made local backups effortless. People saved important things to floppies because that was the most portable, most reliable option available.
Common finds from estates:
Letters and correspondence. Before email was universal, people wrote letters in word processors and printed them. The files often stayed on the floppy. These are sometimes the only surviving copies of correspondence with people who are also gone.
Financial records. Quicken backups, TurboTax exports, household budgets in Lotus 1-2-3 or early Excel. Less sentimental but occasionally important for estate administration.
Scanned photos. The late 1990s was when flatbed scanners became affordable. People scanned old family photos — sometimes prints that have since been lost or damaged. At 1990s resolution these are small files, and a single floppy could hold several.
Early digital photos. The first consumer digital cameras produced tiny files by today’s standards. A 640×480 JPEG from 1998 is about 50–100 KB. A single floppy could hold a dozen.
Writing. Memoirs, journal entries, family histories, recipes. People who typed these things often saved them to floppies and nowhere else.
Nothing identifiable. Some disks are blank, some held software installers, some held work files that no longer matter. Not every disk is a treasure.
Whether to bother
The cost to read a floppy disk is low — $30–$50 per disk, with bulk rates for larger batches. For a stack of 20 disks, the total is comparable to a single hard drive recovery job.
If there is any chance the disks contain family photos, letters, or documents that don’t exist elsewhere, the cost of checking is much less than the cost of wondering. And for many families, finding a letter their parent wrote in 1997, or photos from a vacation they’d forgotten about, is genuinely meaningful.
If the disks are clearly labelled — “AOL,” “Print Shop,” “Windows 95 Backup Disk 3 of 7” — you can make informed decisions about which ones to skip.
Sensitive work handled with care. $30–$50/disk, bulk rates for estates.
Handling them with care
A few practical notes for estate floppy disks:
Don’t rush to throw them away during the cleanout. Floppy disks take up almost no space. Set them aside in a bag or box and deal with them later. There is no urgency — a disk that has waited 25 years can wait another month.
Check the storage conditions. Disks from a climate-controlled house have better odds than disks from a hot attic or damp basement. Both are worth trying, but storage conditions affect readability.
Don’t force damaged disks into a drive. If a shutter is bent or a disk rattles, set it aside. Physical damage needs careful handling.
Note any labels. Even partial labels help prioritise and can indicate what computer formatted the disk (Mac vs PC formatting affects how the disk is read).
Check for other old media too. If the person had floppy disks, they may also have Zip disks, old CDs or CD-Rs, or an old hard drive in a computer in the basement. The same era, the same kinds of irreplaceable files.
What I do with estate jobs
Estate recoveries are something I take seriously. The files are often irreplaceable, the person who could tell you what’s on them is gone, and the person bringing them in is usually dealing with a lot at once.
Every disk is imaged at the flux level, which captures the maximum amount of data regardless of signal degradation. Files are organised by disk and delivered digitally. I can note which disks were blank, which were unrecoverable, and which held data, so you have a clear accounting.
If a disk turns out to be blank or truly unreadable, you don’t pay for it.
Have a relative’s old disks? Start a case — tell me roughly how many and where they were stored. I’ll tell you what’s recoverable before charging anything.