The camera did its job. Then the recorder died, or the loop caught up and wrote across the week that counted, or somebody reset the box while tidying the office. Video is recovered off DVR and NVR disks here: households, shops, yards, farms, insurers, solicitors. On plenty of sites that camera was the only witness on the premises.
Every cctv / dvr job is diagnosed free. The fixed figure reaches you in writing first, before any tools come out.
No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. Full pricing is on the data recovery cost page.
First job on any cctv / dvr is matching the symptom to the fault. Twenty-odd years in, these twenty-five cover nearly every one that reaches this bench.
Writing without pause retires surveillance disks early. That is precisely the duty they were built for and precisely what finishes them. Whatever the platters still hold gets carved back into something watchable.
Pieces of an overwritten period survive down in unallocated space far more often than seems reasonable, so long as recording stops the moment somebody notices. Every further hour of running costs you another hour of the past.
That wipes the index and leaves your video streams sitting precisely where they always were. Cut the power before the recorder claims the space they occupy, because claim it, it will, and soon.
Recorder power supplies and boards give out around a completely healthy disk. As outcomes in surveillance work go it is the most cheerful, and mercifully it is also a common one.
Corruption in Hikvision, Dahua and the countless rebadges of both takes forms that only format-fluent tooling will untangle. Ours has years of practice at exactly that. General-purpose software has none at all.
On the way out of a building, intruders go for the box. The disk inside normally survives that attack and hands over its evidence anyway, which is a satisfying sort of irony.
A recorder out of an incident scene gets stabilised, cleaned and then imaged like any other injured disk. Footage frequently outlives the building it was watching.
Streams reassembled per camera and per timeline, handed over in playable form, and integrity hashes travel with the bundle so the material holds up once somebody questions it.
The map corrupted while the video did not. We rebuild the timeline out of the streams themselves, hour by hour, until the whole thing plays back in the right order.
ST2000VX015 units and their relatives give way under exactly the relentless duty that finishes everyone else's surveillance stock, and WD Purple disks arrive with their heads polished smooth. Filtered-air repair first, then the carve.
Hikvision's range, plus the countless rebadges of it, dominates installations from shop fronts to yard gates up here. We hold a detailed map of its raw storage layout.
Certain lines bind the disk to the box's own firmware so that nothing will mount it anywhere else. The video gets carved straight out of a raw capture, which walks round the problem entirely.
Clocks drift apart across months and nobody notices until the footage suddenly matters. The drift gets measured, written down and corrected, so an exported timeline survives scrutiny.
Their small cards loop themselves flat exactly as a recorder's disk does, only quicker. A worn microSD crosses the corridor to the flash bench and gets read at chip level.
Fitted during a cheap repair, an ordinary desktop disk collapses quickly under continuous duty because nothing rated it for that. Recovered here, then replaced with proper surveillance stock.
An interrupted USB export driven from the recorder's own menu damages the listings, and sometimes the recordings either side of them. Streams get recut from a raw image, with the menu left out of it.
Whole seconds pass between full frames in the H.265 variants, so any damaged span decodes patchily. The mathematics restores what it can restore. Nothing whatsoever is invented to paper over a gap.
Live view worked perfectly while the disk recorded nothing at all, which gets discovered on the day the footage is wanted. We establish the date writing genuinely stopped, and that verdict arrives unsoftened.
Nobody recovers footage that was never written, whatever some website claims. Whatever the sensor did put on the disk comes back exactly, and the difference gets stated plainly rather than fudged.
A locked recorder, plus a phone number nobody answers. Admin passwords mean nothing whatever to the disk itself, and the footage carves straight off those platters regardless.
Bigger recorders spread video across several disks. Lose one and the rest are left holding fragments no individual disk can interpret by itself. Every member gets imaged and the arrangement solved before carving starts, exactly as with any array.
Recorders often export in a house format, bundled with a small player written for Windows XP and never touched afterwards. Your file is fine. Getting it into an everyday player is a conversion job, and one we handle routinely.
Fit a 10TB disk to a recorder whose makers never went past 4TB in testing, and it may only address part of that capacity, looping round the part it can see and overwriting much sooner than the settings promise. Owners discover this when they go looking for last month.
Lightning need not hit the building at all. Strike anywhere near a run of camera cable on open ground and a spike arrives at the recorder along the camera inputs, taking the board out and frequently the drive electronics sitting behind it. Usual route from there: repair the board and carry the ROM over.
Surveillance file systems resemble Windows file systems not at all, so Windows calls the disk raw and offers to format it. Accepting writes a new structure over your footage. Declining costs nothing, and the disk then wants a bench rather than another machine.
Hikvision. Dahua. Swann. HiLook. Annke. And the long list of rebadged boxes built on the very same boards. Each writes video in its own fashion. Raw streams, as a rule, written straight to the disk under no file system an ordinary computer will acknowledge. Those layouts are read directly here. The disk is imaged at sector level first. Streams are then lifted out of that image, each tied back to the channel and the clock it belongs to, and returned as ordinary files that will play on anything, timing preserved. The recorder's menus and export function are never used, which is fortunate, because one of the two is often the reason the footage went missing to begin with.
Footage going to the police, an insurer or a court has to be provably unaltered, not simply watchable. So the work runs on hash-verified images. Every step of handling is logged, from opening the parcel to sending it back out. Exports carry integrity hashes where they are wanted. Tell us the date and the hours in question and the carve targets those recordings before anything else, which matters enormously on a disk carrying months of continuous video. Pricing is simple and stated up front: £400 + VAT for a standard recorder drive, classed as forensic work, which means settlement before the work rather than on results.
Surveillance jobs are drive recovery with video forensics stacked on top, and both trades live in this building:
Native parsers for Hikvision and Dahua, and for the own-brand crowd hiding behind them, converting raw surveillance blocks back into files that actually play.
Frames sorted by channel and by timestamp, then joined up into continuous footage per camera that plays first time, with no argument from a codec.
Purples, SkyHawks, and whatever else a given recorder turns out to be holding, all get imaged on the hardware used by everything else in the drive room.
Verified captures, custody documented throughout, plus integrity hashes on any footage bound for insurers, solicitors or the police.
Recovered material comes back as ordinary files opening in ordinary players. Nobody at your end has to go hunting for a codec.
Nothing writes to the recorder's own disk at any stage. Processing all happens against the captured image instead.
Unscrew the lid on most own-brand boxes and a Hikvision or Dahua silkscreen stares straight back. The DS-7200 range by itself holds an outsized share of the installations across this city, its industrial estates, and the towns strung along the coast. Inside, turning without a break, are surveillance Purples and SkyHawks like the ST2000VX015, which have been writing continuously for years on end. Hence the routine here: inspect it, image it in full, and carve nothing until both of those are done. Yard gates, harbour compounds, boat sheds at Peterhead and Fraserburgh, farm steadings, shop fronts, all sending in identical hardware for identical reasons. Send the disk rather than the recorder wherever you can. Where the box has to travel too, ring 0800 689 0668 first and we will agree between us what needs to come.
Nearly everything on this bench came by tracked, insured post. It is the safest way to shift a failing drive, and a parcel handed in at a North-East post office is usually here the next working day.
Still bolted into a laptop, desktop, MacBook, iMac, server or CCTV / DVR box? Get the hard drive or SSD out first. The bare drive travels on its own. Stripping machines down is not a job this lab takes on. Flash soldered to a motherboard, as on Apple Silicon Macs and a couple of very thin laptops, is our one flat no: if it will not unbolt, it cannot be worked on.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Address it for the attention of Edinburgh Data Recovery. From Aberdeen that is roughly 130 miles and two and a half hours down the A90, or next working day by tracked post if you would rather not make the run. You get a call the moment it is booked onto the bench.
Not sure what belongs in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you tape it shut, or work through the free online diagnostic.
Free diagnosis, one number written down, no fix no fee on the bulk of jobs. Start online or phone it in.