Sure! If you have fairly recent (2010+) floppy disks, with fairly recent (MS Word/Excel) files, you stand a good chance of getting there all by yourself.  There’s two main things to consider:

  1. Your disks need to be fairly recent, and they need to be from a PC.  That means 1.44MB HD disks, not 720K DD, and not from a Mac.
  2. Once you copy your files off of your disks, you need to be sure you can still open them with software you are using today.

If you fit into those two guidelines, you’re probably good to go.  We do get a lot of inquiries like this, though:

I bought a USB floppy drive off of Amazon.  It was able to read a few of my disks, but the rest say, “This disk is unformatted.  Would you like to format it?”  I know they’ve got my files on there, though.  Help!

As you can imagine, we don’t use USB drives for our disk recovery – and we don’t require your disks originally came from a PC, either.  We can read just about any type of disk ever written.  Plus, we specialize in conversion from a wide variety of software programs on a wide variety of hardware types – into formats you can read today, using the computer you have in your lap or your hand now!  Take a look at our conversion offerings (https://retrofloppy.com/formats) and use our quote request form (https://retrofloppy.com/quote) to get access to your older files today!

Do USB Floppy Drives Work? Can I do this Myself?