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 data recovery cost page.
Every cctv / dvr job starts by matching the symptoms to the fault — these twelve cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
Writing around the clock wears surveillance drives out early; whatever the platters still carry, we carve the footage from it.
Loop recording has rolled over the date that matters — power the unit down now and fragments often remain in unallocated space.
A menu deletion clears the recorder's index, not necessarily the video itself — switch it off before it reuses the space.
A dead recorder rarely means a dead drive; the footage lifts straight off the disk inside.
A well-intentioned reset takes the archive with it — carving pulls back everything the quick format never actually touched.
Hikvision, Dahua and their many rebadges write formats no standard tool reads — and they corrupt in equally non-standard ways.
Recorders get smashed or torn off the wall; the drive sitting inside typically comes through the violence intact.
A recorder pulled from a flood or a fire is treated, stabilised and imaged the same way as any damaged drive.
The raw streams are reassembled by camera channel and timestamp, then exported in formats police and insurers can open.
The recordings are on the disk but the recorder has lost track of them — we rebuild the index 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.
Whether the badge says Hikvision, Dahua, Swann, HiLook, Annke or one of dozens of rebadged names, a CCTV recorder lays its video onto a surveillance hard drive in a proprietary format — usually with no standard file system whatsoever. 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. The handling chain gets documented, all work runs off verified images of the original drive, and the footage can be supplied with integrity hashes. Give us the incident date and time window up front — it focuses the recovery on the precise recordings you actually need.
Recovering CCTV means doing video forensics on top of ordinary drive recovery, and the bench carries both layers:
Hikvision, Dahua and the whole rebadged ecosystem have dedicated parsers here that turn raw surveillance formats back into watchable footage.
Individual frames are matched to their channel and timestamp, then knitted into continuous video that plays.
The WD Purples and Seagate SkyHawks inside recorders go through the same hardware-imager stack as any failing drive.
Where the footage is evidence: verified images, a documented chain of custody, and integrity hashes on delivery.
What we recover is handed over in formats that genuinely open — for you, your insurer or the police.
Not one byte is ever written to an original recorder drive — all work happens on its 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 their media to us tracked and insured.
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.