Evidence & investigations · CCTV & DVR recovery
CCTV systems overwrite their oldest footage by design — a loop that doesn't pause because something important happened. The single most useful thing anyone can do after an incident is stop the recorder. Everything we do after that works better for it.
Talk it through, in confidence
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| The situation | What it means | First move |
|---|---|---|
| Footage deleted from the recorder's menu | The index entries are gone; the video usually isn't — yet | Stop the recorder now |
| DVR drive formatted — accidentally or otherwise | A fresh index over intact video streams | Recoverable by carving |
| The recorder is dead | The footage lives on the drive, not the box | Drive out, imaged, parsed |
| The incident was weeks ago | The loop may have overwritten it — honesty first | We check before charging |
| Footage plays in the recorder but won't export | Proprietary formats and broken export functions | We image and export properly |
| You need something police or insurers will accept | Standard playable files plus the native export, documented | Covered on our claims page |
Your device is logged with its own case reference the moment it arrives. An engineer assesses the fault, confirms what's actually recoverable, and you get 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 recorder, or at least pull its drive. Loop recording is overwriting the very footage you need — right now, while you read this.
The drive comes out and is imaged read-only — the recorder itself isn't needed, and a dead one isn't an obstacle. All work happens on the copy.
If the recorder's proprietary index survives, footage is rebuilt with dates and channels. If it doesn't, H.264/H.265 frames are carved from the disk and reassembled into playable files.
Before you pay the recovery fee you approve a full listing of what came back. Your data returns on new media with free return postage, and the case only closes once you've confirmed everything opens on your side.
On the '30 days' everyone quotes: there is no legal CCTV retention period in the UK — around 31 days is an industry convention shaped by data-protection's storage-limitation principle, and real systems often loop far sooner than their settings claim. The safe assumption after any incident is that the clock is already running.
By the time the insurer asked for footage, the recorder had been looping for nine days. The drive was imaged, the index parsed, and the incident window recovered from sectors the loop hadn't yet reached — exported twice, once for people and once for the claim.
Often, yes — if the recorder was stopped before the loop overwrote it. Deleting removes index entries; the video itself survives until new recording lands on top of it.
No — genuinely overwritten video has been physically replaced by new video, and no lab can undo that. It's why stopping the recorder is the whole ballgame.
Usually not. Footage lives on the hard drive inside; we remove it, image it, and recover from the image. The recorder is just the box it lived in.
It depends on disk size, camera count and quality settings — busy systems can loop in days. Treat every footage job as urgent until the recorder is stopped.
Loops overwrite, artefacts age, deadlines pass. Open a case first — the scoping conversation is free and confidential either way.