Evidence & investigations · CCTV & DVR recovery
All CCTV systems overwrite the oldest footage as they record new footage, in a continuous loop which does not pause based on whether anything of interest occurs. The one best action you can take immediately following an incident is to stop the recorder. Everything else we do becomes easier once you've stopped the recorder. From Brighton, only the hard drive containing your recordings needs to be sent to us, not the recorder itself. Get a quote first, over the phone or using our online quote form, then post the hard drive tracked and insured, or drop it off at our Guildford intake lab, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm (no appointment needed). The free diagnosis covers it.
Talk it through, in confidence
01273 964902
| The problem as described | What it means | First thing we do |
|---|---|---|
| Video deleted from the DVR menu | Index entries gone. Video still there, mostly, for now. | Stop the recorder now |
| Drive on DVR has been reformatted (intentionally or by mistake) | New index made on top of untouched video streams | Recoverable by carving |
| The recorder is dead | Video exists on the drive, not in the box | Drive out, imaged, parsed |
| Weeks since the event occurred | The loop may have written over it already: we’re honest here | We check before charging |
| Video plays in the DVR but can’t be exported | Proprietary format and non-functioning proprietary export | We create images and exports properly |
| Something that either law enforcement agencies or insurance companies would be willing to accept as evidence | Standard playable files, along with the native export of the video; both are documented | This is covered on our claims page |
Your device is logged under its own case reference as soon as it arrives. An engineer assesses the fault and confirms what is actually recoverable. And you receive a fixed price in writing: no diagnosis fee. No obligation. And no paid work until you say go.
First instruction on every call: stop the DVR or, at the minimum, remove its hard drive. The DVR is looping over the footage you need, so you can't wait until after the fact to take action.
The hard drive is pulled and copied off as a read-only image; the recorder itself is not required, so a dead recorder is not going to hinder the work. All operations occur against a working copy of the source material.
Rebuilding footage with correct dates and channel identifiers will occur if the recorder’s proprietary index remains intact. In cases where the proprietary index has failed to survive, H.264/H.265 frame segments are then extracted from the disk and re-assembled into viable playback files.
You approve a full listing of everything that came back before you pay the recovery fee. Your data returns on new media with free return postage. And the case only closes once you have confirmed all items open on your side.
On the '30 days' everyone quotes: there is no specific statutory length for CCTV retention in the UK; around 31 days is an informal industry guideline shaped by data protection's storage-limitation principle. Real systems will often loop much faster than they were configured for. As soon as an incident occurs, it should be assumed that the clock has already started.
At the point at which the insurer requested footage of the incident, the DVR had been looping for nine days. The drive was imaged, and the index was read and used to recover the incident window from the sectors of the disk that the DVR had not yet overwritten. The video was exported twice (once for people viewing it and again for the insurer's claim).
Yes, often, as long as the recorder was stopped before its loop overwrote that video. Deleting removes index entries but doesn't destroy the video until new recordings land on top of it.
No: truly overwritten video has been replaced by new video physically, and no lab can undo that. That's why stopping the recorder is all that matters.
Generally not. The footage exists on the hard drive inside the recorder box; we just need that hard drive: get a phone quote, or fill out the form first, then take the hard drive out and post it tracked and insured, or drop it off at our Guildford intake lab, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm (no appointment needed). We image it and recover from the image.
This will depend upon how many cameras you have recording, the size of the disks and how high a quality setting you select; busy systems can loop in a matter of days. Treat every footage job as urgent until the recorder is stopped.
Loops destroy data, artefacts age and eventually deadlines expire. Open a case first: the initial scoping call is free and confidential either way.