You have footage of an incident, a break-in or an insurance claim, and your DVR has stopped working completely, recorded over it or someone has deleted it. We are able to retrieve CCTV and DVR recordings for homes, businesses, solicitors and insurance companies all over Staines and the wider Surrey area.
Free diagnostic on every CCTV/DVR job. One fixed quote in writing before any work starts.
In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. For all electronic and mechanical work, including chip-level repairs, 50% is required upfront, with the balance only payable if we recover your data. For BitLocker, ransomware, CCTV/DVR and forensic jobs, full payment is made upfront once you accept the fixed quote. Full details regarding our costs can be found on the data recovery cost page.
The first thing we do on any CCTV/DVR job is match the symptoms to the fault: these 12 cover virtually every issue that reaches our bench.
Constant, round-the-clock use eventually wears out surveillance drives. Whatever data is still left on the platters, we can carve the footage from it.
Loop recording has rolled the recorder over past the date in question. Turn it off immediately, as fragments often remain in unallocated areas of free space.
Deleting from the menu merely removes the recorder's index of what was stored, not necessarily the video itself. Turn the recorder off immediately to stop it reusing the space.
A dead recorder doesn't usually mean a dead disk: the footage can be pulled straight off the disk inside.
Resetting a recorder wipes out its previous archives, but our carving recovers the archived video that the quick format never actually touched.
Hikvision, Dahua and their many rebadges produce DVRs that use proprietary file formats which standard tools cannot read, and these files become corrupted in equally non-standard ways.
Recorders frequently suffer physical damage or are ripped off walls, but a high percentage of the time the hard drive inside remains undamaged.
Flooded or burnt recorders are treated, stabilised and imaged in the same way as any other damaged drive.
Once we have reassembled the raw streams by camera channel and timestamp, they are exported as files that the police and insurance companies can open.
The disk contains the video, but the recorder has lost the index for viewing it, so we recreate the index from the raw streams.
WD Purple and Seagate SkyHawk surveillance drives run 24/7 and their heads generally fail early, so we image these drives on our head-swap bench before carving.
Some Hikvision and Dahua units "lock" the drive to their firmware, so the footage is carved from a raw image instead of being mounted.
Whether the badge says Hikvision, Dahua, Swann, HiLook, Annke or one of dozens of rebadged names, a CCTV recorder puts video streams onto a surveillance hard drive in a proprietary format, almost always without any standard file system. To recover the footage, you must truly understand how to read and interpret those raw formats. We do this by carving the video streams directly from the disk, reassembling them by camera channel and timestamp, then exporting them as standard playable files with the original timing intact.
When footage will be sent to the police, a court or an insurance company, continuity matters. The chain of custody is documented, so there is a paper trail of who has worked on the evidence; all recovery work is performed from verified images of the original drive; and the footage can be supplied with integrity hashes. If you give us the date and time window of the incident up front, it focuses the recovery on the specific recordings you need.
Video forensic recovery (CCTV recovery) adds a layer to the normal drive recovery we perform, and our bench carries both layers:
We have specialised parsers for Hikvision, Dahua and other rebadged versions of those products. These parsers take unwatchable raw surveillance footage and convert it back into viewable footage.
Each frame of video is associated with the proper channel and timestamp, and then combined into a single video stream that is continuous and playable.
All drives within recorders, including WD Purple and Seagate SkyHawk, are processed using the exact same hardware imagers used for any failing drive.
Where footage is evidence: verified images, a documented chain of custody, and integrity hashes to verify the data on delivery.
Whatever we recover is provided in formats that can truly be opened by you, your insurance company, or the police.
Not even one byte is ever written to an original recorder drive: all operations are performed exclusively on the image of the original drive.
Most "own brand" recorders have Hikvision or Dahua under the hood, and the drive tells us the truth once it's on the bench. The WD Purple and Seagate SkyHawk surveillance drives in these recorders run 24/7 and fail heads early, and some Hikvision and Dahua recorders lock the drive to their firmware, so the footage is carved from a raw image rather than mounted normally.
Before sending anything, get a quote from us either by telephone or using our free online diagnostic. Then post your hardware to us (tracked and insured), or drop it off at our Guildford laboratory in person.
Sending a drive from a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV/DVR or server? You will need to remove the internal hard drive or SSD and send us just the drive, as we are unable to remove the drive for you. We also cannot recover storage soldered onto a motherboard, such as in Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops. Only drives that can be removed from a machine and sent to us can be recovered. If you are unsure whether your device has a removable drive, please call us before sending. RAID, server and SAN drives need to be removed from their enclosure and labelled by bay. For a NAS, send the disks themselves if they are removable, otherwise the entire NAS device. An external single drive should come to us whole, along with its cable and power supply.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Please mark the package for the attention of Guildford Data Recovery, and we will call you as soon as we have diagnosed your media.
Unsure as to how to proceed with sending the item in for recovery? Then simply call 0800 689 0668, or complete the free online diagnostic prior to dispatching the item to obtain your price quotation.
Free diagnostic, fixed quote, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Start now or call the freephone.