Footage of a break-in, an incident or an insurance dispute, and your DVR has failed, overwritten it or someone has deleted it. We recover CCTV and DVR recordings for Sheffield homes, businesses, solicitors and insurers.
Free diagnostic on every CCTV / DVR job. One fixed quote in writing before any work is done.
On most jobs you only pay if we recover your data. For electronic repair, mechanical repair and chip-level work, we require an initial payment of 50% of the quote, with the balance only payable if we recover your data. All forensic, BitLocker and ransomware jobs, and all CCTV / DVR work, are paid for in advance once you accept the fixed quote. Please view complete pricing information on our data recovery cost page.
Every CCTV / DVR job begins by matching the symptoms to the fault. Our team has seen numerous problems over time, and ten common categories cover almost everything that makes it onto the bench.
Surveillance drives continuously write new footage 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and they usually fail early, so the video you want is carved from whatever the platters still hold.
The loop recording process overwrites older recordings in order to keep recording, so the date you need may have been consumed; however, you may find fragments of the records you seek in unallocated space if the unit is stopped now.
Deleting footage from the menu simply removes the reference to the stored data within the index, but does not necessarily delete the actual video. Turn off the power immediately.
The recorder may be dead, but the drive lives on, so the video can be extracted directly from the disk.
An engineer resets the recorder and the archive goes with it, but 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: most of the time the drive inside will survive the violence.
Flood-site and fire-site recorders are treated and imaged like any damaged drive in the lab.
Raw streams are reassembled by camera channel and timestamp and exported into standard playable formats for police or insurers.
Recordings exist but the recorder cannot find them, so we rebuild the index from the streams themselves.
In general terms, CCTV recorders, including Hikvision, Dahua, Swann, HiLook, Annke and dozens of others that are just branded differently, store video on surveillance hard drives in a proprietary format, often with no standard file system at all. Therefore, recovering footage from these recorders requires an understanding of what those raw formats look like. We extract video streams directly from the disk; each stream is associated with a specific camera channel and timestamp, so we can reassemble them by channel and timestamp and export them in a standard format that can be played back, preserving the original timing.
Where footage is needed for police, court or insurance, continuity matters. We keep documentation regarding how all video recovered from a device has been handled, and all of it is processed from verified copies of the original drive. When the video is being presented as evidence, we can provide integrity hashes for it. Please let us know both your incident date and time window when you first contact us, because knowing exactly when the event happened allows us to focus our efforts on the correct recordings.
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 are matched up by channel and timestamp, then rebuilt as one continuous, playable piece of video.
WD Purple and Seagate SkyHawk drives are imaged using the standard hardware-based imaging kit.
Once the images have been verified, we document the entire chain of custody and provide integrity hashes where the recovered footage is to be used as evidence.
Recovered footage comes back in formats that will actually play, whether it's for you, your insurer or the police.
The original recorder drives are never written to: everything takes place on an image.
Most own-brand recorders are really Hikvision or Dahua underneath, and the drive tells us the truth about what is there once it's on the bench.
Our customers get a quote first before sending their media to us, either by telephone on 0800 689 0668 or by completing our free online diagnostic. Once a customer has their quote, they post their media to us, tracked and insured.
Sending a drive from a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Please remove the hard drive or SSD from your machine and send us just the drive; we do not offer an internal drive-removal service. If you have a server or RAID system, please send us every disk, each clearly labelled with its bay. We cannot recover data from storage that is soldered directly onto the motherboard (for example Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops), so we need removable drives to be sent to us. If you are unsure which kind you have, ring us first.
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Mark your package for the attention of Leeds Data Recovery and we will contact you as soon as we have diagnosed your media.
Unsure about what to send? Call us first on 0800 689 0668 or complete our free online diagnostic.
Receive a free, no-obligation diagnostic and a fixed price quote for your CCTV or DVR issue. The price is taken upfront when you agree to proceed. Get started now or call our freephone.