Footage of an incident, a break-in or an insurance dispute — and the DVR has failed, overwritten it or someone deleted it. We recover CCTV and DVR recordings for Sheffield homes, businesses, solicitors and insurers.
Free diagnostic on every cctv / dvr job. Fixed quote before any work — and no fix, no fee.
Every cctv / dvr job starts by matching the symptoms to the fault — these ten 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.
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 understanding those raw formats: we carve the video streams directly from the disk, reassemble them by camera channel and timestamp, and export standard playable files with the original timing preserved.
Where footage is needed for police, court or insurance, continuity matters. We document the handling chain, work only from verified images of the original drive, and can supply footage with integrity hashes. Tell us the incident date and time window up front — it focuses the recovery on the exact recordings you 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.
Most customers post or courier their device to us — it arrives next morning, and the free diagnostic starts the day it lands.
Sending a drive from a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac 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. If the storage is soldered in (e.g. Apple Silicon), call us first on 0800 689 0668.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Mark the package for the attention of Leeds 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.