The camera saw everything — then the recorder died, the loop rolled over the crucial week, or a reset wiped the archive. We carve surveillance footage off DVR and NVR drives for households, businesses, insurers and legal teams across Swindon and Devizes.
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 twenty cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
A 24/7 write duty kills surveillance drives young; whatever the platters still hold is carved into playable footage.
Pieces of the overwritten window routinely persist in unallocated corners — provided recording stops this minute.
Deletion removes the index and strands the streams in place — power off before the space gets recycled.
PSU and board failures leave the archive whole on the disk inside — the commonest happy ending in CCTV work.
An engineer's factory reset empties the archive; carving retrieves whatever the reset never physically touched.
Hikvision, Dahua and their many rebadges corrupt in ways only format-fluent carvers can unpick.
Intruders attack the recorder; the drive inside usually survives the violence and testifies anyway.
Recorders pulled from incident scenes are stabilised, cleaned and imaged like any damaged drive.
Streams rebuilt per camera and timeline, delivered in playable form, integrity hashes included for the evidence file.
The recordings exist but the recorder lost its map — the timeline is rebuilt from the streams themselves.
Purple drives of the WD42PURZ class turn up with heads worn flat by years of round-the-clock writing — imaged before carving.
Seagate's surveillance 4TB fails the same relentless 24/7 way — clean-bench repair first, then the carve.
The most-installed recorder family in local systems; its raw storage format is fully mapped on this bench.
Certain recorder lines tie their disks to the recorder's own firmware — so the video is carved straight from a raw capture, with nothing ever mounted.
Drift between camera clocks gets measured, noted and corrected, keeping exported timelines defensible.
A power cut resets the clock to 2000 and new footage files under false dates — real times are re-derived during the carve.
Camera doorbells and dashcams loop tiny cards to death — worn microSDs cross to the flash bench for chip-level reads.
Recorders locked in airless cupboards cook their drives through every summer — heat-aged media is imaged with extra patience.
An ordinary PC drive swapped in during a repair fails fast under 24/7 load — recovered, then replaced with proper surveillance stock.
An interrupted export through the recorder's own menu damages the index — the streams are recut from a raw image instead.
Hikvision, Dahua, Swann, HiLook, Annke and their countless rebadges write video their own way — raw streams laid onto the drive, frequently with no file system a computer would recognise. Our carving tools speak those dialects natively: streams are cut from a sector image, matched to camera channel and clock, and delivered as standard files that play anywhere with original timing preserved. The recorder's own menus never get a say.
Video destined for the police, a courtroom or an insurer needs provable integrity, not just playable pictures. Work runs on hash-verified images with handling logged from arrival to hand-back, and exports can carry their own integrity hashes. Name the incident date and the hours that matter when the job starts, and the carve is aimed at just those recordings. 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.
CCTV recovery is video forensics stacked on drive recovery, and both halves live on this bench:
Format-native parsers for Hikvision, Dahua and the rebadge crowd — raw surveillance data decoded into watchable video.
Frames matched by channel and timestamp, then knitted into continuous playable footage.
Purples, SkyHawks and whatever else a recorder holds are imaged on the same hardware stack as every drive here.
Verified images, documented handling and integrity hashes wherever the footage is destined for evidence.
Finished footage arrives as ordinary files that play at the first attempt — for you, an insurer or the police.
Nothing ever writes to the recorder's original drive; each operation runs against the captured image.
Look inside most own-brand recorders and the board wears Hikvision or Dahua silkscreen — the DS-7208HQHI family alone covers a startling share of local installs. Spinning inside are WD Purple WD42PURZ and SkyHawk ST4000VX007 surveillance drives, run flat-out for years, which is why every job starts with a clean-bench check and a full image before any carving begins.
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 Oxford 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.