The camera saw it — then the recorder died, the loop rolled over the crucial week, or a reset wiped the archive. We carve surveillance footage back off DVR and NVR drives for York households, shops, insurers and legal teams; race-day crowds included, when the incident happens to land on one.
Every cctv / dvr job is diagnosed free. The quote turns up fixed, in writing, before a screwdriver is lifted.
No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. Full pricing is on the data recovery cost page.
First job on any cctv / dvr is putting the symptoms against the fault — after twenty-odd years, these twenty-five account for nearly everything that comes through the door.
Continuous writing retires surveillance drives early. Whatever footage the platters still carry gets carved back into something watchable.
Slices of an overwritten window persist in unallocated space more often than seems fair — provided recording halts the moment you realise.
That erases the index and abandons the streams in place. Cut the power before the recorder recycles the room they occupy.
Recorder PSUs and boards fail around a healthy disk. The most cheerful ending in surveillance work, and mercifully common.
An engineer's factory reset blanks the listings. Carving raises whatever the reset never physically overwrote — usually a great deal.
Hikvision, Dahua and their many rebadges corrupt in ways only format-fluent tooling untangles. Ours has years of practice at exactly this.
Intruders attack the box on their way through. The drive inside routinely survives the assault and gives evidence anyway — a pleasing irony.
Incident-scene recorders are stabilised, cleaned and imaged like any injured drive. The footage frequently outlives the premises.
Streams reassembled per camera and timeline, delivered in playable form with integrity hashes accompanying the evidence bundle.
The index corrupted; the recordings didn't. We rebuild the timeline from the streams themselves, hour upon hour.
Surveillance WDs arrive with heads polished smooth by years of unbroken writing. Image first, carve second — the order is absolute.
Seagate's surveillance range fails under the same relentless duty as everyone else's. Hood repair, then the carve.
Hikvision's family and its countless cousins dominate installs hereabouts, and their raw storage layout is mapped exhaustively at this end.
Certain lines bind the drive to the box's firmware, so we never mount anything — the video is carved directly from a raw capture instead.
Clocks drift apart over months. We measure, document and correct the drift so exported timelines hold up under questioning.
The recorder rewinds to the year 2000 and files new footage under fiction. True times are re-derived while carving.
Their little cards loop to exhaustion just like recorder disks. Worn microSDs cross the corridor for chip-level reads.
Locked cabinets bake recorders annually, and heat-aged platters arrive expecting sympathy. They get patient imaging instead, which works better.
Fitted during a cheap repair, an ordinary PC drive collapses fast under 24/7 duty. Recovered — then replaced with proper surveillance stock.
Interrupted USB exports through the recorder's menu damage the listings. We recut the streams from a raw image and skip the menu entirely.
H.265 variants stretch whole seconds between full frames, so damaged spans decode patchily. What mathematics can restore, we restore; nothing gets invented.
Live view worked; the disk recorded nothing — discovered the day footage mattered. We establish when writing truly ceased and give the verdict unvarnished.
Two-disk recorders misconfigured to fill one and ignore its neighbour. The loaded drive is carved; the empty one gets thirty seconds and an honest shrug.
Never-written footage cannot be recovered by anyone, whatever their website claims. What the sensor did commit to disk comes back precisely.
A locked recorder and a number that rings out. The disk is indifferent to admin passwords — footage carves directly off the platters.
Hikvision, Dahua, Swann, HiLook, Annke and their endless rebadges write video their own way — raw streams straight onto the disk, often with no file system a computer would admit to recognising. The carving tools here speak those dialects natively: streams cut from a sector image, matched to camera channel and clock, delivered as ordinary files that play anywhere with the original timing intact. The recorder's own menus never get a vote.
Video bound for the police, a courtroom or an insurer needs provable integrity, not just watchable pictures. Everything is done on hash-verified images, the handling written down at every stage from arrival to hand-back, and any export can be issued with integrity hashes of its own. Name the incident date and the hours that matter and the carve is aimed at precisely those recordings — a break-in at a Clifton Moor unit, a dispute in a race-day crowd, whatever the drive was keeping. Pricing is simple and stated up front: £400 + VAT for a standard recorder drive, classed as forensic work, which means settlement before the work rather than on results.
Surveillance recovery is drive work with video forensics laid on top; this workshop keeps both trades in-house:
Native parsers for Hikvision, Dahua and the own-brand crowd, decoding raw surveillance blocks into watchable files.
Frames sorted by channel and timestamp, then joined into continuous per-camera footage that plays first time.
Purples, SkyHawks and anything else found inside a recorder image on the same hardware stack as the rest of the drive room.
Verified captures, documented custody and integrity hashes wherever footage heads for insurers, solicitors or police.
Recovered material lands as ordinary files in ordinary players — no codec safari required at your end.
The recorder's disk is never written to at any point; all processing happens against the captured image.
Lift the lid on most own-brand recorders and Hikvision or Dahua silkscreen greets you — the DS-7200 dynasty alone accounts for an outsized share of installs across the city and surrounding market towns. Spinning within are surveillance Purples and SkyHawks that have written every second for years, which is why each job opens with a hood inspection and a complete image before one frame gets carved.
Nearly every job on our bench arrived by tracked, insured post — it's the quickest, safest route in. There's no collection service, so the parcel is yours to send or hand in.
Is the drive still inside a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Take the hard drive or SSD out first and post the bare drive on its own — removing drives from machines isn't a service we offer. Storage that's soldered to a motherboard (Apple Silicon Macs, certain slim laptops) is the one thing we can't work on: if it doesn't come out, it can't come in.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Address the parcel for the attention of Leeds Data Recovery — about 40 minutes from York via the A64 and A1(M), or next working day by tracked post. You'll hear from us the moment it's booked onto the bench.
Not certain what to pack? Ring 0800 689 0668 first, or run the free online diagnostic.
Free diagnosis, a fixed written figure, no fix no fee on most work — start online or ring the freephone.