The camera captured everything, but then the recorder died, the loop recorded 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 starts.
In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Electronic and mechanical failures and chip-level work are 50% upfront, with the balance only if we recover your data, while BitLocker, ransomware, DVR and forensic jobs are paid upfront once you accept the fixed quote. You'll find full pricing on the data recovery cost page.
Every CCTV / DVR job begins by matching the symptoms to the fault, and these twenty cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
A 24/7 write load wears surveillance drives out early; whatever the platters still hold is carved into playable footage.
Fragments of the overwritten period often survive in unallocated corners of the disk, as long as recording stops right now.
Deletion removes the index and leaves the streams stranded where they are, so power off before the space gets reused.
PSU and board failures leave the archive whole on the disk inside: the most common happy ending in CCTV work.
A factory reset by an engineer empties the archive, but carving retrieves whatever the reset never physically touched.
Hikvision, Dahua and their many rebadged versions corrupt in ways only carvers fluent in their formats can unpick.
Intruders go for the recorder, but the drive inside usually survives the attack and gives its evidence anyway.
Drives from recorders taken from incident scenes are stabilised, cleaned and imaged just like any other damaged drive.
Streams are rebuilt by camera and timeline and delivered in a playable format, with integrity hashes included for the evidence file.
The recordings are there but the recorder has lost its map, so the timeline is rebuilt from the streams themselves.
Purple drives in the WD42PURZ class arrive with heads worn flat by years of round-the-clock writing, and they're imaged before any carving.
Seagate's 4TB surveillance drive fails in the same relentless 24/7 way: it's repaired on the bench first, then carved.
The most widely installed recorder family in local systems; its raw storage format is fully mapped on this bench.
Some recorder lines tie their disks to the recorder's own firmware, so the video is carved straight from a raw capture without anything ever being mounted.
Drift between camera clocks is measured, noted and corrected, so exported timelines stay defensible.
A power cut resets the clock to 2000 and new footage gets filed under false dates, so the real times are worked out again during the carve.
Camera doorbells and dashcams loop small cards until they wear out, and worn microSDs go across to the flash bench for chip-level reads.
Recorders shut away in airless cupboards cook their drives every summer, and heat-aged media is imaged with extra patience.
An ordinary PC drive fitted during a repair fails quickly under a 24/7 load; it's recovered, then replaced with proper surveillance stock.
An export through the recorder's own menu that gets interrupted damages the index, so the streams are recut from a raw image instead.
Hikvision, Dahua, Swann, HiLook, Annke and their many rebadged versions all store video in their own way, laying raw streams straight onto the drive, often without any file system a computer would recognise. Our carving tools understand those formats natively: we cut the streams from a sector image, match them back to the right camera channel and clock, and deliver standard files that play anywhere with the original timing preserved. The recorder's own menus never come into it.
Footage heading to the police, a courtroom or an insurer has to prove its integrity, not just play back. The work runs on hash-verified images with handling logged from arrival to hand-back, and exports can carry their own integrity hashes. Tell us 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, which counts as forensic work, so it is paid upfront once you accept the fixed quote rather than on results.
CCTV recovery is really video forensics layered on top of drive recovery, and both halves are handled on this bench:
Format-native parsers for Hikvision, Dahua and the many rebadged versions, turning raw surveillance data into watchable video.
Frames matched by channel and timestamp, then stitched together into continuous, playable footage.
Purples, SkyHawks and whatever else a recorder holds are imaged on the same hardware stack as every other drive here.
Verified images, documented handling and integrity hashes wherever the footage is headed for evidence.
The finished footage comes back as ordinary files that play first time, whether it is for you, an insurer or the police.
Nothing is ever written to the recorder's original drive; every operation runs against the captured image.
Open up most own-brand recorders and you will find Hikvision or Dahua silkscreen on the board; the DS-7208HQHI family alone accounts for a surprising share of local installs. Inside them spin WD Purple WD42PURZ and SkyHawk ST4000VX007 surveillance drives, run flat out for years, which is why every job starts with a bench check and a full image before any carving begins.
Most customers get a quote first, by phone or with the free online diagnostic, and then 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 (from a server, every disk, each labelled with its bay), as we don't offer a drive-removal service. We don't recover storage soldered to a motherboard (for example T2 and Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops), only drives that can be removed and sent to us. If you're not sure which kind you have, ring us first.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Mark the package for the attention of Oxford Data Recovery and we'll ring you as soon as we've diagnosed your media.
Not sure what to send? Ring 0800 689 0668 first or use the free online diagnostic.
Free diagnostic and a fixed quote, with CCTV and DVR work paid upfront once you accept it. Start now or call the freephone.