The break-in was on camera — and now the recorder won't boot, or the loop has overwritten the week, or someone helpfully formatted it. We carve surveillance footage back off DVR and NVR drives for Swansea households, businesses, insurers and legal teams.
Free diagnostic on every cctv / dvr job. One fixed quote in writing before any work begins.
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.
Every cctv / dvr job starts by matching the symptoms to the fault — these fifteen cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
A 24/7 duty cycle kills surveillance drives young; footage carves from whatever the platters still hold.
Fragments of the erased window regularly survive in unallocated space — if recording stops right now.
Deletion drops the index and leaves the streams behind — power down before the space is reused.
PSU and board failures leave the archive intact on the disk inside.
A visiting engineer resets the recorder and the archive vanishes with it — carving brings back whatever the format never actually touched.
Hikvision, Dahua and the rebadges break in ways only format-aware carvers can unpick.
Recorders take the violence; the drive inside usually rides it out.
Recorders from incident sites are treated and imaged like any other damaged drive.
Streams reassembled by channel and clock, exported playable, integrity hashes supplied.
The recordings exist but the recorder has lost its map — rebuilt from the streams themselves.
WD20PURZ-class surveillance drives arrive with exhausted heads after years of continuous writing.
Seagate's surveillance line fails the same 24/7 way — imaged on the clean bench before carving.
The most common recorder family in local installs — its raw format is fully mapped here.
A few recorder families weld the drive to their own firmware — so the footage comes out by carving the raw image, not by mounting anything.
Clock drift between cameras is documented and corrected so exported timelines stand up as evidence.
A CCTV recorder — Hikvision, Dahua, Swann, HiLook, Annke or one of the dozens of rebadges — doesn't file video the way a computer would. Streams go down on the surveillance drive in the maker's own raw format, frequently with no recognisable file system at all. Our carvers speak those formats: streams are cut straight from a sector image, matched back to camera channel and clock, and exported as standard files that play anywhere with the original timing intact.
Footage bound for the police, a courtroom or an insurance claim needs its integrity provable, not just its pictures. Work proceeds on hash-verified images with the handling chain documented end to end, and exports can carry integrity hashes. Hand over the incident date and the window you care about at the start, and the carve is aimed at precisely those recordings. One thing to know about pricing: CCTV recovery runs £400 + VAT for standard recorder drives, is classed as forensic work, and is therefore payable upfront.
CCTV recovery is video forensics layered over drive recovery, and the bench covers both halves:
Format-native parsers for Hikvision, Dahua and every rebadge of them — raw surveillance data decoded into watchable video.
Frames matched by channel and timestamp, then rebuilt into continuous playable video.
The WD Purple and Seagate SkyHawk drives inside recorders image on the standard hardware stack.
Verified images, a documented handling chain and integrity hashes wherever footage is evidence.
Exports land as standard files that open first time — whether the audience is you, an insurer or the police.
The original recorder drive is never written to; every operation runs on the image.
Strip the badge off most own-brand recorders and a Hikvision or Dahua board looks back at you — the DS-7208HQHI family alone accounts for a striking share of jobs here. Inside them spin WD Purple WD20PURZ and Seagate SkyHawk ST2000VX008 surveillance drives, worked around the clock for years and imaged on the clean bench before any carving starts.
Most customers post or courier their media to us.
Sending a drive from a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR 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. We don't recover storage soldered to a motherboard (e.g. Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops) — only drives that can be removed and sent to us.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Mark the package for the attention of Bristol 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.