Footage of an incident, a break-in or an insurance dispute — and the DVR has failed, overwritten it or someone's deleted it. We recover CCTV and DVR recordings for homes, businesses, solicitors and insurers across Staines and the Surrey area.
Free diagnostic on every cctv / dvr job. One fixed quote in writing before any work begins.
No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. Full pricing is on the free diagnostic page.
Every cctv / dvr job starts by matching the symptoms to the fault — these twelve cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
Surveillance drives write 24/7 and die young — the footage is carved from whatever the platters still hold.
Loop recording ate the date you need; fragments often survive in unallocated space if the unit stops now.
Menu deletions remove the index, not necessarily the video — power down immediately.
The recorder dies, the drive doesn't; footage extracts directly from the disk.
An engineer resets the recorder and the archive goes with it — carving recovers what the format skipped.
Hikvision, Dahua and friends use non-standard formats that break in non-standard ways.
Smashed or ripped-out recorders — the drive inside usually survives the violence.
Flood-site and fire-site recorders are treated and imaged in the lab like any damaged drive.
Raw streams reassembled by camera and timestamp, exported to standard formats for police or insurers.
Recordings exist but the recorder can't find them — the index is rebuilt from the streams themselves.
Surveillance-grade WD Purple and Seagate SkyHawk drives run 24/7 and fail heads early — imaged on the clean bench before carving.
Some Hikvision and Dahua recorders lock the drive to the unit's firmware — the footage is carved from a raw image instead of mounted.
CCTV recorders — Hikvision, Dahua, Swann, HiLook, Annke and dozens of rebadged systems — write video in proprietary formats onto surveillance hard drives, usually with no standard file system at all. Recovering footage means genuinely understanding those raw formats: we carve the video streams straight off the disk, reassemble them by camera channel and timestamp, and export standard playable files with the original timing kept intact.
Where footage is bound for police, court or an insurer, continuity matters. We document the handling chain, work only from verified images of the original drive, and can supply footage with integrity hashes. Give us the incident date and time window up front — it focuses the recovery on the precise recordings you actually need.
CCTV work is video forensics on top of drive recovery:
Parsers for Hikvision, Dahua and the rebadged ecosystem — raw surveillance formats turned back into footage.
Frames matched by channel and timestamp, rebuilt into continuous, playable video.
WD Purple and Seagate SkyHawk drives imaged with the standard hardware-imager stack.
Verified images, documented chain of custody and integrity hashes where footage is evidence.
Recovered footage delivered in formats that actually play — for you, your insurer or the police.
Original recorder drives are never written to — everything happens on the image.
Most 'own-brand' recorders are Hikvision or Dahua underneath — the drive tells us the truth once it's on the bench. The WD Purple and Seagate SkyHawk surveillance drives inside them run 24/7 and fail heads early; and some Hikvision and Dahua units lock the drive to the recorder's firmware, so the footage is carved from a raw image rather than mounted normally.
Most customers post or courier their media to us.
Sending a drive from a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Please remove the internal hard drive or SSD and send us just the drive — we don't provide an internal drive-removal service. We don't recover storage soldered to a motherboard (e.g. Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops) — only drives that can be removed and sent to us.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Mark the package for the attention of Guildford Data Recovery and we'll call you as soon as we diagnose your media.
Not sure what to send? Call 0800 689 0668 first or use the free online diagnostic.
Free diagnostic, fixed quote, no fix no fee — start now or call the freephone.