Pulling pictures from old phones & laptops, oh my!
December 14, 2015 2:42 PM   Subscribe

Is there a service that pulls pictures and videos from a bunch of old phones, laptops & Macbooks?

My mother has a box full of old phones and laptops (both MAC & Windows machines) sitting in the back of the closet. She won't get rid of them because, "there are pictures in them that I need to get out first." She's been fretting over that box of crap for the last 5 years, but it's just going to sit there for the next 40 years unless I do something about it. I want to surprise her for her birthday coming up in March and take care of this for her.

I'd like to be able to hopefully send them all to one place and have them pull pictures and videos off the various hard drives and devices. I've been through the box and there are no power cords. I'm 99% sure they all work so it's not data recovery in the sense of hardware failure.

Does something like this exist? Would it be the realm of a local computer place or..? Also, I have a spare 5TB portable hard-drive, can I send that along and have them throw everything on there?

Please don't tell me how easy it is to do it myself.. because no. Just no. That's not happening.
posted by crayon to Computers & Internet (4 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
There may be a separate cache of old power cords in the back of a different closet. I have a closet like that.
posted by JimN2TAW at 2:51 PM on December 14, 2015 [1 favorite]


Looks like Best Buy/Geek Squad will do it.

Also, when I worked for a local computer company (though we focused on businesses rather than consumers), I know we would have done it, at least for anything we could figure out power cords for, and we would have LOVED to have a hard drive to put everything on from the customer. (Hell, if it weren't for the cords - I don't have anything for Mac - and you were near me, I'd offer to do it for you.) It could be worth a shot, and a local place is probably going to be more flexible than Geek Squad.

...actually, for the laptops, you wouldn't even really need the power cords - if I were working on it, I'd pull the hard drives anyway and just hook them up as a secondary to a known-good machine. And a lot of phones share power cords. (So I probably *could* do it.)
posted by dust.wind.dude at 3:03 PM on December 14, 2015


Best answer: Yeah. This is something your local independent computer shop should totally be able to do for you. I'd get a couple quotes because there may be wildly varying costs quoted to you for this somewhat nonstandard service. Or, honestly, this is something that your moderately geeky friend would probably be happy to do for you.

BB/GS can almost certainly do this, too, but I'd trust your local well-regarded independent shop way more than them.
posted by Betelgeuse at 4:18 PM on December 14, 2015


Post it here in Jobs! With the location so you can find someone local.
posted by raisingsand at 5:42 PM on December 14, 2015 [3 favorites]


« Older Elavil helpful for migraines?   |   Good subscription food gift for a diabetic? Is... Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.