Investigations & evidence · video recovery from DVRs
Every CCTV system writes over its oldest video, and the loop carries on whatever it has just recorded. After an incident there are many things you can do, but only one thing will help most. The key thing is simply to switch off the recording equipment. Everything else has to wait until someone has done that.
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| The complaint | What that tells you | First step |
|---|---|---|
| Someone cleared clips using the DVR menu | Only the catalogue was wiped, so the video is likely still present | Power the unit off now |
| The recorder's disk was formatted, whether by mistake or not | New catalogue laid over untouched video | Carving can retrieve it |
| The box won't switch on | Video is stored on the disk, not inside the recording device | Disk removed, cloned, read |
| It happened several weeks back | Recording may already have covered parts of the video; if so, we will let you know | A free check settles it |
| It plays on screen, but exporting fails | Faulty export routines, plus closed file formats | We clone it and export cleanly |
| An insurance company or the police must be able to access it | Ordinary playback copies, the exported original, plus the notes | Our insurance page explains |
Your item will have a unique case number assigned to it immediately after we receive it. An engineer will diagnose the issue, tell you what can genuinely be recovered and then provide you with one fixed price in writing. The diagnosis itself is completely at no cost to you. You are under no obligation to allow us to do any work that would incur a charge.
The very first thing we tell callers never changes: switch the equipment off, or take the disk out. While you are reading this, the loop is writing over exactly the footage you want back.
The disk comes out of the recorder and we take a read-only copy of it. From that point on, the recorder doesn't do anything, so a dead unit makes no difference, as every step thereafter operates based on the clone.
In cases where the manufacturer's original index is intact, the clips are put back together with channel numbers and timestamps. When it no longer exists, H.264/H.265 frames have to be pulled off the drive and combined into playable files.
Once you have the complete listing of all the recoverable files back from us, you can "sign-off" and your recovery fee becomes due. Once you've signed-off, all the files will be posted out to you on new media (with postage included) and the case will remain open until you confirm that they can be opened properly at your location.
About the '31 days' people repeat over and over: there is no legislation in the United Kingdom that governs how long surveillance footage must be kept. The most commonly cited number, 31 days, is a trade habit, largely driven by the storage-limitation principle in data-protection law. Many systems also recycle well before their settings suggest. As soon as something happens at your site, assume that time is already against you.
Nine days of looping had passed before we finally got a request from the insurance company. At that point we made an image of the disk, read the index and pulled the incident window out of the sectors the loop had not yet touched. From there, we exported the footage twice: once for viewing and once for the claim.
Usually yes, as long as you turned the machine off before the loop came round again. Deleting an event removes it from the index but leaves your video in place, at least until new recording overwrites some or all of it.
No. Truly overwritten material has had new video put in place of the old, and no lab can take this back. This is why switching off the recorder is all-important.
Very rarely. The footage sits on the hard drive inside the unit; that disk comes out, we make an image of it and work from the image. In effect, the recorder is just a casing around the disk.
It depends on the disk capacity, how many cameras are running and what quality they are set at. A busy system can loop round within days, so until you switch off the recorder, treat every footage case as urgent.
Loops are erased, footprints disappear and time runs out. Start your case as soon as possible; obtaining an estimate has no cost and is completely confidential.