The cameras did their part. Then the recorder failed, or the loop came round and wrote over the week that mattered, or somebody hit reset while tidying the office. Footage is carved back off DVR and NVR disks here for households, shops, pubs, insurers and solicitors across Leicester and the county, including the yards, depots and trading estates around the M1 and M69 junction and out towards Magna Park, where a camera on a pole is often the only witness anybody has.
Every CCTV or DVR that arrives here is examined at no charge. The figure quoted afterwards is put in writing and settled before anybody reaches for a screwdriver: £400 + VAT on the disk lifted out of a CCTV or DVR recorder.
Logical recoveries carry no fix, no fee. The named exceptions to it are electronic and mechanical failures, chip-level work, DVR jobs and forensic jobs; physical work takes 50% up front. The five bands are set out in full on the data recovery cost page.
Tracing a symptom back to the failure underneath it is where the real work begins, and these thirty account for all but a handful of the boxes opened at the Cambridge bench. A fault missing from the list is not an unfamiliar one — describe it on the telephone and you will get a straight view of the odds before you spend anything on postage.
Recorder disks write continuously for years without a break, which is a harder life than any desktop drive has. When one fails the recorder usually still powers on and simply reports no storage. The footage is on the disk rather than in the box, so the disk is what travels.
Every recorder overwrites its oldest footage when the disk fills, and on a busy multi-camera system that can be a matter of days. If the box has kept running since the incident, some of what you want has been genuinely replaced. How much depends on the camera count and the retention setting.
Deletion clears the index the recorder keeps and leaves the video where it lies until the loop reaches it. That makes prompt action worth a great deal. Unplug the recorder rather than leaving it running while you decide what to do.
Intruders take the recorder more often than the cameras, and the ones that get smashed rather than stolen frequently leave the disk intact inside a wrecked chassis. A crushed case is not a crushed drive. It is worth opening carefully and looking.
A recorder that has been factory reset writes a fresh index and, on some models, begins formatting the disk. Where the box was switched off quickly the footage underneath is largely intact. Where it has run for a week since, considerably less of it is.
Recorders write proprietary formats and their export tools produce files that only their own software understands. That is a common reason an insurer or a solicitor rejects what they were sent. Footage recovered here is converted to standard video files that will play anywhere.
The index has been damaged while the video data has not. Recorders keep a separate table of what was written and when, and losing it makes a full disk look empty. Carving the video back out by its own structure ignores the index entirely.
Time information lives in the index and in the frame headers, and a damaged index leaves clips that play with no idea when they happened. Reconstructing the timeline from the frame data and the write order is part of the work, and it matters most where the footage is going to be used as evidence.
Ordinary mechanical failure, and it sounds the same in a DVR as in anything else. Surveillance-grade disks are built for constant writing rather than for surviving impact, and once one starts ticking the recorder should be switched off rather than left to keep trying.
DVRs are frequently installed in a cupboard, a loft or a cabinet with no ventilation, and the disk inside runs far above its rating for years. Heat is the commonest reason a recorder disk fails early. The damage is recorded on the surface and it does not go away when the cupboard door is opened.
Losing mains mid-write leaves the file system and the index half updated, and recorders rarely have any protection against it. The video is intact and the structure around it is not. That is a straightforward carve from an image and one of the more common jobs here.
Network video recorders often spread footage across multiple disks. Losing one takes out the whole set, and every disk has to travel and be labelled with its position. A striped recorder set is priced as an array from 500 pounds + VAT rather than as a single recorder disk.
Standalone and wireless cameras write to a card in the camera body, and those are handled here as ordinary card work at 250 pounds + VAT. High-endurance cards handle continuous writing better than ordinary ones, and cameras fitted with the cheap sort fail predictably.
Say so when you ring. Urgent jobs get moved up the list, and a business that has stopped trading goes to the front. To be straight about the timing: the free assessment takes two working days from arrival and the work runs from there. Anybody promising footage tomorrow is guessing.
Admin passwords on recorders get set by the installer and lost with the paperwork. That prevents you exporting through the box and has no bearing at all on reading the disk, which is done directly. It is one of the more common reasons a recorder ends up here rather than being exported at home.
Frequently the best case on this page. An old recorder disk sitting in a drawer has stopped being overwritten, which means whatever was on it when it came out is still there. Age is not the enemy here, continued recording is.
Recorders write long continuous files and a single unreadable region takes out everything after it as far as a player is concerned. The footage past that point is still present. Repairing the container and re-indexing brings back the remainder, which is often the part that matters.
Some recorders write their own layout and present the disk in ways a computer does not expect, and some use a host protected area. A disk that appears to be the wrong size in Windows is usually nothing of the kind. It is read raw here and interpreted afterwards.
Dashcams fail quietly and keep showing a light. The card wears out under continuous writing, the file system breaks, and the camera carries on as though nothing has happened. Check the footage occasionally rather than after the accident, and use a high-endurance card.
Where the storage is a card or a removable module it is worked here in the ordinary way. Where it is soldered into the device, it is not, and that limit is the same one that applies everywhere else on this site.
Some of the most disappointing calls on this page are systems that were configured to record only on motion and then missed the event. Nothing was written, so there is nothing to recover, and that gets said plainly rather than after money has changed hands.
A recorder can run for months with a failed or unformatted disk, showing a live picture the whole time and storing nothing. Owners discover it on the day they need footage. The assessment establishes whether anything was ever written, and it costs nothing.
Where a recorder has a second disk for archiving, or where it was upgraded and the old one left in, both should travel. Which one holds the period of interest is not always obvious from the outside and it takes minutes to establish here.
Surveillance disks that have stopped turning are subject to the same stiction and lubricant problems as any other, and one hopeful power-up is what turns a straightforward job into a difficult one. Send the disk and let it be inspected on the clean bench before it is offered power.
Older DVRs with small disks and PATA connections still turn up from shops, pubs and yards across the county. Adapters and period donors are held here. The formats are proprietary and well understood, and the age of the system is not usually the problem.
Where the recording is going to be evidence, the handling matters as much as the result. That is forensic work, priced at 800 pounds + VAT with a written report, or 400 pounds + VAT for an image with deleted-file extraction and no report. Say so at the start rather than after the footage has been recovered.
Yards, depots and small industrial units around the M1 and M69 junction and out towards Magna Park account for a steady flow of this work, and the footage is often the only account anybody has of what happened. Urgent commercial jobs are moved up the list on request.
Engineer visits that involve a factory reset or a disk replacement are a common cause of loss. Whether anything survives depends on what was done and how long the box has run since. Ask what was changed, and send the disk rather than the recorder.
Some systems write to network storage rather than to a disk in a box. That is array work rather than recorder work, priced from 500 pounds + VAT, and every member has to travel. Say what the arrangement is on the booking form, because it changes the whole approach.
Not every call here is a failure. Frequently the recorder is working, the footage is present, and the owner cannot get it out in a form anyone will accept. That gets handled too, and it is worth asking about before assuming the disk has failed.
Every recorder overwrites its oldest footage when the disk fills, and on a busy multi-camera system that can come round in days rather than weeks. If the incident you need is still on the disk, it comes back. If the system has kept recording for a fortnight since, a large part of it has been genuinely replaced and no laboratory can produce what is no longer there. So the first and most useful action is to take the recorder off power, and it is the one most people skip because the cameras are still needed. The same applies where clips have been deleted through the recorder's own menu: deletion clears the index the box keeps and leaves the video where it lies until the loop reaches it. Time is the only thing that turns a recoverable clip into a lost one. Take the disk out, put a spare in if the system has to keep running, and send the original. It is also worth knowing that a recorder can run for months with a failed or unformatted disk, showing a live picture the whole time and storing nothing at all, which people generally discover on the day they need footage.
Recorders do not write ordinary file systems. Hikvision, Dahua, Swann, Samsung, Bosch and a long list of white-label boxes each use their own arrangement, and a recorder disk connected to a computer will usually be reported as unformatted or empty. That is not damage, it is a format Windows has never heard of, and it is read here directly rather than through the box. Where the recorder's own index has been damaged or deleted, the video is recovered by recognising its own frame structure instead, which works whatever the index says. What that leaves is a timing problem, because clips carved without an index have no obvious time attached to them, and the timeline is rebuilt from the frame headers and the order the disk was written in. That matters most where the footage is going to an insurer or a court. The last step is conversion: recovered footage goes out as standard video files that will play on any computer, rather than in a proprietary export that only the original software understands, which is a frequent reason material gets sent back as unusable.
A recorder disk is an ordinary drive carrying an unusual file system, and both halves of that need dealing with. The benches below cover reading a disk that has been writing without a pause for six years, and then making sense of a format the manufacturer never documented.
Surveillance drives arrive with weak regions scattered across years of writing rather than with one clean failure. Per-head imaging with retry limits enforced in hardware banks the good ground first and comes back to the awkward parts at the end.
Hikvision, Dahua, Swann, Samsung, Bosch, Pelco and a long list of white-label boxes each write their own arrangement. Reading those formats directly, rather than through the recorder, is what makes footage recoverable when the box itself has gone.
Where the recorder's own table of contents has been damaged or deleted, video is recovered by recognising its own frame structure. That works regardless of what the index says, which is why a disk the recorder reports as empty is frequently full.
Clips carved without an index have no obvious time attached to them. Timing is rebuilt from the frame headers and from the order in which the disk was written, which matters most where the footage is going to be relied on by an insurer or a court.
Recovered footage is converted to standard video files rather than handed over in a proprietary export that only the original software understands. That is frequently the difference between evidence being accepted and being sent back.
Recorder disks fail mechanically like any other and get head replacements under filtered air when they need them. Recorder work is one of the published exclusions from no fix, no fee, and physical work takes 50% up front.
A standard recorder disk is 400 pounds + VAT, the same band as an encrypted drive, and a striped multi-disk NVR is an array starting at 500 pounds + VAT. A camera card is 250 pounds + VAT. The assessment costs nothing and closes two working days after the disk is booked in. Recorder work is one of the published exclusions from no fix, no fee, and that is stated here rather than buried, because it is the one thing on this page people are most entitled to know before they commit. Send the disk, not the recorder: the box is heavy, it is not needed at this end, and the footage is on the drive. Two things decide how much comes back. The first is how long the system kept recording after the event, because the loop overwrites the oldest footage first. The second is whether anybody accepted an offer to format or reset. Unplug the recorder, take the disk out, and ring 0800 689 0668 if the job is urgent.
The post office does most of the work of getting a job here. A drive that is already unwell travels better boxed and insured than rattling around a car for a day of errands, and something dropped into a Leicestershire postbox this afternoon is generally logged in at Cambridge tomorrow.
The general rule is the drive travels and the machine stays behind — out of the laptop, out of the tower, out of the iMac, out of the recorder under the counter. This bench does not dismantle equipment, and a repair shop will do it while you wait. Three things are the other way round, and getting them wrong costs you the recovery: an external drive stays sealed in its own case, a NAS comes as a complete unit, and a WD My Passport or My Book travels whole with its cable, because on those the encryption key is held on the bridge board rather than on the disk — separate the two and the data becomes unreadable even to us. A Fusion Mac needs both of its drives, each labelled. The one thing nobody can work round is flash soldered onto the mainboard, as on Apple Silicon machines: if it will not come off, there is nothing to post.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Address it to Cambridge Data Recovery. It is about seventy miles from Leicester if you fancy driving it — M1 south to Junction 19, then the A14 east — and the lab is two minutes off Junction 32 with parking at the door. Posting costs you a stamp and a day instead. Whichever you choose, you hear from us the moment it is booked in, and the free diagnostic closes two working days after that.
Not certain what belongs in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you tape it up, or let the free online diagnostic ask the questions for you.
The examination is free, one written figure follows it, and the band covering this page is £400 + VAT on the disk lifted out of a CCTV or DVR recorder.