Exhibit work · drives out of DVR, NVR and CCTV boxes
A DVR fills its disk, then starts again at the front, replacing the oldest video with the newest. It has no idea which of those minutes you need — age is the only thing it goes on. Cut the power and that overwriting stops dead. Everything after that happens on a bench, off a copy.
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| What you see | What is behind it | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Someone on the team wiped the clips | Only the pointer went; the video stayed | Turn it off at the wall now |
| A repair engineer formatted the recorder disk | A fresh, empty index laid over the old video | We carve the video frames out |
| No lights, no picture, nothing | The video is on the drive, not the dead board | We take the drive out and clone it |
| The incident was a fortnight back | The loop may already have covered it; diagnosis will say | The free assessment settles it |
| It plays back, but will not export | A dead USB port, or export firmware at fault | Exporting from the clone sidesteps the problem |
| Your insurer or the police has asked to see it | Exhibit pack: native export, MP4, hashes and a report | Tell us when you book the case |
Every item gets a case number of its own the day it lands. An engineer then works out what has actually failed and tells you plainly which files have a real chance of coming back and which do not. Only then does a price follow: one figure, fixed, in writing, and it costs you nothing to see it. Nothing is charged until you say yes.
We say the same thing on every one of these calls: pull the plug at the socket, or take the drive out of the unit. Nothing we do afterwards matters half as much, because while that box runs it is still writing over your evidence.
Out comes the drive, and a write blocker sits between it and our imager while a sector-for-sector copy is taken. Nothing can travel back the other way. After that the recorder no longer matters: all the work happens on the copy.
Hikvision writes a HIKBTREE index and Dahua keeps its own DHFS tables. If those structures still read, clips come back labelled with the camera and the time they were shot. If they do not, we sweep the image for the video frames — H.264 and H.265 — and rebuild them into playable files.
No invoice is raised until the full list of recovered files has sat in front of you and you have said go ahead. Your data comes back on media we buy new, posted at our expense, and the job is not closed here until every file has opened on your own machine.
On the thirty-day rule: no UK law obliges you to keep CCTV for any minimum period at all. The 31 days everyone quotes traces back to the storage-limitation principle in data-protection law, which describes an intent rather than the capacity of a disk. What you actually hold is set by camera count, bitrate and drive size. Work to the smaller figure.
The insurer asked for the video nine days after the break-in, and the recorder had never been switched off. We cloned the disk, took the index apart, and pulled the minutes that mattered out of blocks the loop had yet to touch. Two copies went back: one for viewing, one for the claim file.
Generally yes, provided the unit was stopped before the loop came back round to that stretch of disk. A deletion only clears the pointer. The pictures stay where they are until fresh video lands on top of them.
No. Once new frames have taken the same blocks, the old recording has gone, and no laboratory anywhere can bring it back. That is the whole reason we ask you to kill the power before anything else.
Rarely. A recorder is little more than a case built round a hard drive, and the footage lives on that drive rather than on the board. We take the drive out, clone it, and work on the clone.
That turns on capacity, how many cameras feed the unit and what bitrate they use. A busy site can wrap right round in a matter of days, so treat any footage job as urgent while the box is still switched on.
Every hour the recorder runs, more of what you need is gone, and the deadline stays where it is. Book it in now: the diagnosis is free and stays confidential.