The camera did its job, and then the recorder gave out, or the loop came round and wrote across the week you needed, or somebody hit reset while tidying the office. Footage gets carved back off DVR and NVR disks on this bench for homes, shops, licensed premises, insurers and solicitors right across Liverpool and Merseyside, including the yards, depots and trading estates where a camera on a pole is the only witness anybody has.
Every cctv / dvr job is diagnosed free. One fixed figure follows in writing, agreed before a screwdriver comes out of the drawer.
No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. Every band is listed on the data recovery cost page.
Matching the symptom to the fault underneath is the first job on any cctv / dvr, and after twenty-odd years these thirty account for very nearly everything that arrives.
Writing without a pause retires a surveillance drive early. That is the duty it was built for and it is still the duty that finishes it. Whatever the platters are holding gets carved back into something watchable.
A period the recorder has already overwritten is not automatically gone. Fragments of it survive in unallocated space surprisingly often, but only where the recording was stopped as soon as somebody realised. Each hour the box stays powered buries more of what you are looking for.
Deleting through the menu takes out the index entry. The video itself stays exactly where it was written. Pull the power before the box starts writing over that space, because it will, and it will not wait long about it.
A recorder can lose its power supply or its board while the disk inside carries on in perfect health. That is the happiest ending available in this line of work, and it turns up more often than you would expect.
The engineer reset the box and the listings went blank, while the video data underneath was never touched. Carving raises whatever that reset did not physically overwrite, which is normally the bulk of it.
Hikvision, Dahua and the long list of rebadges behind them each corrupt in their own way, and untangling the result takes tooling that already knows the format. A great many of these jobs have passed through this workshop.
On the way out, intruders take a swing at the box. What is remarkable is how often the disk inside survives that and hands over footage of the people who broke it. There is a certain justice in that.
A recorder pulled out of an incident scene is stabilised, cleaned and then imaged in the same way as any other damaged drive. Very often the footage outlasts the building it was watching over.
Streams are reassembled per camera and per timeline, then handed over in a playable form with integrity hashes alongside, so the material stands up when it is questioned. Forensic work with a written report is £800 + VAT, and like all DVR work it sits outside the no fix, no fee guarantee.
The index corrupted and the video did not. We reassemble the timeline out of the streams themselves, hour by hour, until the whole thing plays back in the correct order.
Years of writing with no pause at all polish the heads on a WD Purple or a Seagate SkyHawk smooth. Take the image before anything else happens. Carving comes afterwards, and never the reverse.
The ST2000VX015 and its close relatives give out under the same non-stop duty as every other disk in a recorder. Repair in filtered air first, then the carve.
Hikvision's own range, plus the rebadged versions of it sold under other names, make up most of what gets installed around here. That raw storage layout has been mapped in detail on these benches.
Some product lines tie the disk to the firmware in the box, so it will not mount anywhere else at all. The answer is a raw capture with the video carved directly out of it, which avoids the problem altogether.
Camera clocks drift apart over months, and nobody looks until the day the footage matters. The drift is measured, written down and corrected, so that an exported timeline stands up when somebody goes through it.
A recorder that loses its clock reverts to the year 2000 and stamps everything after that with a date which never existed. Real times get worked back out during the carve instead of being guessed at.
Their little cards loop themselves to exhaustion exactly as a recorder disk does. A worn microSD crosses the corridor to the flash bench for a chip-level read. A card or a pen drive is £250 + VAT.
A locked cabinet bakes the recorder every year, and heat-aged platters turn up expecting sympathy. What they get instead is patient imaging, which works considerably better than sympathy does.
Somebody fitted a plain desktop disk during a cheap repair. Continuous duty is not what that drive was rated for, and it gives up quickly. We recover it, and proper surveillance stock goes in afterwards.
An export through the recorder menu that gets interrupted damages the listings. We recut the streams from a raw image and leave the menu out of it completely.
H.265 and its variants can leave whole seconds between one full frame and the next, so a damaged stretch decodes in patches. We restore what the mathematics allows. Nothing is ever invented to smooth over a gap.
Live view was working and the disk had been recording nothing for months. That gets discovered on the one day the footage matters. We work out when writing actually stopped, and the answer comes back straight, however unwelcome it is.
A two-disk recorder configured to fill the first bay and ignore the second entirely. The loaded disk goes forward for carving. The other takes half a minute to check, and you get a straight answer about it.
Nobody can recover footage that was never written in the first place, whatever a website may tell you. What the sensor did put on the disk comes back exactly as it was recorded.
The recorder is locked and the installer no longer answers the phone. None of that matters to the disk, which has no interest in admin passwords whatsoever. The footage carves straight off the platters.
A larger recorder spreads its video over several disks, so the loss of one leaves the others holding pieces that mean nothing on their own. Image every member, solve the arrangement, then carve. That is the same order as any other array.
Recorders like to export in a house format, bundled with a small player built for Windows XP and untouched since. There is nothing wrong with the file. Turning it into something an everyday player will open is a conversion job, and one we handle regularly.
Put a 10TB disk into a recorder that was never tested beyond 4TB and it may address only part of it. The recording then loops around that part, overwriting much sooner than the settings suggest. Owners discover this on the day they go looking for last month.
Lightning does not need to strike the building. A hit near a long cable run, especially across open ground out towards Aintree or Knowsley, sends a spike back along the camera inputs and into the recorder, taking out the board and frequently the drive electronics with it. The usual route back is a donor board with the ROM transferred. That is invasive work, so it is not guaranteed work.
A surveillance file system bears no resemblance to anything Windows recognises, so the disk is reported as raw and you are offered a format. Accept, and a fresh structure goes down on top of the footage. Decline, and nothing at all is lost. After that the drive wants a bench, not another machine.
Every manufacturer writes its recordings differently. Hikvision, Dahua, Swann, HiLook, Annke, and the long line of rebadged boxes built on the same boards, mostly dump raw streams onto the disk with nothing on it that a Windows machine would recognise as a file system. Software on this bench parses those structures directly. A full sector-by-sector copy is taken, the streams are cut out of it, each one is matched back to the channel it came from and to the clock the recorder was running, and the result is handed over as ordinary video files that will play on anything, with the original timing intact. At no stage does anybody go near the unit's own menus or its export function, which is fortunate, because one or the other is frequently the reason the footage went missing to begin with.
Anything going to the police, an insurance company or a court has to be provably unaltered, not simply viewable. So the work is done on copies verified by hash, and a record of how the drive was handled is kept from the moment the packaging comes off until it goes back in the post. Exports can carry their own integrity hashes where the recipient wants them. Give us the date and the rough band of hours and the carving is pointed there before anywhere else, which makes a large difference on a disk carrying several months of continuous recording. The price is set in advance and stays put, at £400 + VAT for a standard recorder drive. Because CCTV falls into the forensic category, that amount is settled before the work begins rather than paid on results.
Surveillance jobs are drive recovery with video forensics laid over the top, and both trades live in the same building:
Hikvision and Dahua parsed natively, along with the own-brand crowd standing behind the pair of them. Raw surveillance blocks come out the far side as files that play.
Frames are sorted by channel and by timestamp, then joined into continuous footage for each camera. It should play the moment you open it, with no argument.
Whatever a recorder turns out to be holding, Purple, SkyHawk or otherwise, is imaged on the same equipment as every other drive in the building.
Captures are verified, custody is documented, and integrity hashes go with anything bound for an insurer, a solicitor or the police.
Recovered material is handed over as everyday files that open in everyday players. Nobody at your end should have to go hunting for a codec.
Nothing is ever written back to the disk that came out of the recorder. Every stage of the processing runs against the captured image.
Most own-brand recorders have a Hikvision or Dahua board inside, wearing another company's badge on the front. The DS-7200 family on its own accounts for a startling share of what is fitted across the city centre, the retail parks, and the industrial estates out towards Kirkby and Knowsley. Inside them, turning without a pause, sit the surveillance drives: Purples, SkyHawks, an ST2000VX015 or something very like it, recording continuously for years at a stretch. So every job here opens with an inspection and a full image, and no frame gets carved until that capture has finished. A recorder drive is £400 + VAT. It is forensic-class work and falls outside no fix, no fee, which means it is settled before the job runs. Send the drive on its own wherever that is possible. If the box itself has to travel, ring 0800 689 0668 first and we will agree what comes.
Almost every job on this bench came in by tracked, insured post. It is the calmest way to move a drive that is already struggling, and a parcel handed in anywhere on Merseyside usually reaches the bench the following working day.
Still screwed inside a laptop, tower, MacBook, iMac, server or a CCTV recorder? Take the drive out and post that on its own. We do not strip machines here, and any computer shop will do it in a few minutes. The one job nobody can take on is flash soldered straight to a logic board, as on Apple Silicon Macs and a handful of very slim laptops: if the storage will not unbolt, there is nothing to send.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Address it to Manchester Data Recovery. It is roughly 35 miles from Liverpool along the M62 if you fancy the run, and next working day by tracked post if you do not. We ring or email the moment it is booked in, and the free diagnostic closes 2 working days after that.
Not sure what belongs in the parcel? Call 0800 689 0668 before you tape it shut, or step through the free online diagnostic first.
Diagnosis free, one figure written down, and £300 + VAT covers a single drive or SSD. Start online or ring.