The club membership list, the old inventory system, the .mdb from a job that no longer exists — tables out, into Excel or CSV.
XLSX: one workbook, one sheet per table, headers in row 1. CSV: a single .csv if the database has one table, otherwise a ZIP with one .csv per table. Data types, dates and text encodings are handled by mdbtools, the long-standing open-source Access reader.
Those are application logic, not data — they don’t survive outside Access. The tables (your actual data) are what this extracts, and that’s almost always what people are trying to save.
Access 97 through 2003 (.mdb) and the newer .accdb format both read. Password-protected databases don’t — remove the password in Access first if you can.
It’s written to a private temporary folder for the few seconds the conversion engine needs, then deleted — nothing is retained, logged or shared. No account, no email, no “files kept for 24 hours” fine print. These are often someone’s letters, family records or old business files; we treat them accordingly.