Cougar, its a friend who lost her husband to a particularly vicious cancer very recently. The pen drives contain precious photos. She isn’t computer literate. There are no backups.
I apologise for my insensitivity, I had no idea. However, it must be stressed that she needs to back them up ASAP. If you don’t have three copies of your data, you don’t have data. Pendrive, local hard drive, cloud / otherwise offsite.
I didn’t want to recommend just plugging then in just in case the PC recognised a corruption and reformatted the drives.
That won’t happen; rather, in that situation she’d be prompted “this drive isn’t formatted, do you want to format now?” (in which case the answer is obviously “no”). And we can cross that bridge when we come to it.