Investigations & evidence · CCTV and DVR footage
A DVR never stops to think about what it filmed. Old video gets recorded over on a rolling loop, day and night, and the clip you need is next in the queue. Kill the power to the recorder and that loop stops dead — everything after that we can sort out on the bench.
A quiet word, in confidence
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| What's wrong | What it usually means | Step one |
|---|---|---|
| Clips wiped through the recorder's own menu | That removes index entries, not the footage itself | Cut the power straight away |
| The disk got formatted — accident or otherwise | A blank index on top; the streams survive beneath | We carve the frames back out |
| The recorder itself is dead | It's the drive inside that holds the footage, not the box | We pull the drive and image it |
| The incident is weeks old | The loop may have got there first — we'll tell you honestly | The free diagnosis gives the answer |
| Playback works; the USB export won't | A proprietary format and a flaky export tool | We image the disk and export it properly |
| The footage has to satisfy police or an insurer | Playable MP4s, the native files, and a written note | See the insurance & police page |
Your device is logged under its own case number the day it arrives. An engineer finds the fault, tells you plainly what stands a real chance of coming back, and writes you one fixed quote. Nothing is charged for that look, nothing obliges you, and paid work starts only when you say so.
Before anything else, our advice is the same every time: pull the recorder's power, or lift the drive out of it. Every hour it keeps running, more of the video you care about goes under new recording.
The drive comes out and is copied read-only here. From that point the DVR itself is irrelevant — a dead unit is no obstacle — and all further work happens on the copy.
If the recorder's own catalogue survives, we use it to bring clips back with channel numbers and times attached. If it has gone, we search the disk for H.264/H.265 video directly and rebuild files that play.
Before any fee falls due you see a full listing of everything recovered and approve it. Your files travel back on brand-new media, return postage on us, and the case stays open until you've confirmed everything opens on your own machine.
On the '30 days' everyone quotes: no UK statute sets a CCTV retention period. The 31-day habit grew out of data-protection law's storage-limitation principle; in practice, systems often loop a good deal sooner than their settings promise. Once something has happened, treat the clock as already running.
The recorder had looped for nine days before the insurer came asking for the footage. The disk was imaged, its index decoded, and the incident window lifted from sectors the overwrite hadn't yet reached — two exports made: one for viewing, one for the claim.
More often than not, yes — so long as the recorder was powered down before the loop wrapped round. A delete only wipes the index; the video itself sits there until new footage records over the top.
No. When new video has been recorded across the old, nothing any lab does will bring it back — which is exactly why powering the recorder off matters more than anything else.
Hardly ever. Everything recorded lives on the disk inside; we remove that disk, take an image and do all work on the copy. The box itself is just packaging for the drive.
It depends on the size of the disk, the camera count and the recording quality — on a busy system the loop can come round in days. While the recorder stays powered, every footage job counts as urgent.
Recorders overwrite on a loop, evidence weakens, time limits pass. Open a case early — the first look is free and confidential.