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NDR / Claims, court and footage / Video read off recorder disks

Evidence work · the hard disks inside CCTV recorders

CCTV and DVR recovery, Nottingham. Take the recorder off the mains now; the rest of it keeps for an hour.

Ten seconds at the socket is worth more than anything else you will do today, and here is the reason. The disk fills up, the recorder goes back to block one, and fresh video goes down over the oldest. Age decides that order and nothing else does, so the ninety seconds you actually need count for no more than an empty stockroom on a quiet Sunday. Cut the supply and it stops there. The rest happens at the bench, on a copy of the disk: nothing for the assessment, £400 + VAT for the work, one figure agreed in writing before you are charged for anything, and no fee on most jobs where nothing is recovered. Small sites around Nottingham make up most of it — a trade counter on Blenheim Industrial Estate at Bulwell, a gate camera over a yard at Markham Vale, a shop unit on Beeston High Road.

On most jobs, nothing to pay if no files come back Treated as an exhibit from the moment it lands Every hour, the loop writes over more of it

An engineer will talk it through, in confidence
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What actually arrives here.

Hikvision and HiLook boxesNothing else arrives here in anything like these numbers. Read the head of the disk and there is the HIKVISION signature, with a B-tree index behind it, and between those two the clips come back labelled.
Dahua boxesSecond by volume on this bench, and built to an entirely different plan: DHFS tables, video written as .dav files. Whatever still parses gets parsed and the remainder gets carved.
Swann, Reolink, Annke and UniviewDozens of badges sit on top of a handful of chipsets. Get the disk out of its housing and the arrangement is generally one this bench has seen many times over, at which point whose name is on the lid ceases to matter.
Grey unbranded boxesFitted years ago by a firm that no longer trades, no manual, nobody left to ring. Behind the lid, though, sits a disk that writes video into blocks — and blocks are what this bench reads. None of that alters the job.

Your CCTV recorder's symptom, and the next move.

Something else? Say what it does →
What is happeningWhat usually causes itWhat that means for you
Somebody erased the clips from the menuA row went out of the index; the pictures did not moveTake the supply off today
The installer formatted it to get the box runningAn empty index is all a format lays down; what sat underneath is left aloneCarving pulls the frames back out of the image
No lights, no picture, nothing at allThe board gave out. Video lives on the disk, and never on the boardPost the disk and we image it
It happened a fortnight backThe loop may have covered it by now, and that is answerableThe free look settles that
Playback runs, export will notA dead USB socket, or export firmware that has given outYour clips come off our copy instead
A solicitor or a loss adjuster has asked for itBundle: native clips, MP4 copies, hashes, a method noteTell us when you book it in
Getting it here: tracked, insured post to the intake lab, and the return leg is at our cost. Unsure what belongs in the box? Ring before it is taped up, and an engineer will run through what to include and what to keep at home. The rest of it is set out on the packing and postage guide.

The order we work in.

More jobs like this one →
01

Booked in the day it arrives, and the first look is on us Free

Your device picks up a case number the day it arrives, and an engineer then establishes what has genuinely gone wrong — at no cost, and ahead of everything else. Two things come back to you together: a plain account of what can be lifted and what cannot, and one fixed figure in writing. Agree to that figure, or turn it down and pay nothing.

The first look is freeOne fixed figure, in writingNo charge at this point
02

Supply off, before anything else

Every footage call taken here opens the same way: get the box off the mains, or take the disk out of it. Nothing else on this page is worth as much to you, because a powered recorder is quietly writing across the exact clip you rang about.

Supply off firstThat stops the loop
03

A copy nothing can write to

The disk goes behind a hardware write blocker and comes off sector by sector, with nothing travelling the other way. From the moment the image is made, the recorder is irrelevant to us and every later step happens on the copy.

Read behind a write blockerA dead recorder is no obstacle
04

Maker's tables first, carving second

Hikvision lays down a HIKBTREE index; Dahua uses DHFS tables instead. Where enough of either still parses, each clip arrives with its camera and its recording time attached. Where neither will, the job drops a level: the image gets combed for the byte signatures that begin a compressed frame — H.264, H.265 — and clips are rebuilt from what that turns up.

The maker's own tables firstFrame carving where they have gone
05

The file list comes before the bill

The file list reaches you before any invoice does. Say yes and it is billed; say no and it is not — and on most jobs, if nothing comes back there is nothing to pay. Whatever comes off goes home on media bought in for your case, carriage at our end. Nothing here is closed until you have opened those files on your own machine.

Nothing is charged until you agree the figureNew media, bought in for your jobWe pay to send it home

What turns up on recorder disks

  • No filesystem on there will look familiar — every manufacturer arranges its blocks to suit itself. Plug one of these disks into a PC and Windows cannot make sense of what it finds, so it offers to format the thing; consumer undelete software reports nothing whatsoever.
  • Pictures live in the blocks, labels live in the index — where the index survives, every clip is named and timed on arrival. Where it does not, the video returns anyway, though the file itself will not tell you which lens shot it or when.
  • The box weighs nothing up — oldest block next, always. An empty corridor and the moment you rang about are the same thing to it.
  • Authority matters here too — the person booking the job must be entitled to have that system examined. Give us the owner's name at the booking stage, and where ownership could be argued about, take advice before you post anything.

On retention: there is no statutory minimum in the UK for keeping CCTV. The figure people repeat to one another was lifted out of data-protection guidance whose actual wording is that footage ought not to be kept once the purpose behind keeping it has ended — a rule about reasons, not about disks. Your own recorder is a sum: how many cameras, running at what bitrate, onto a disk of what size. Nobody can do that sum over the telephone, and you do not need us to: the recorder knows already. Its playback calendar carries an earliest date against every camera, and that date is the only honest figure anybody can give you. It gets later every hour the unit stays on.

One of these, from start to finish.

NG · NTG-2026-1696ON THE LOG ✓

Nine days went by before the Nottingham shop asked for its footage

The loss adjuster took nine days to ask, and nobody had switched the recorder off in the meantime. Out came the disk. It was imaged, the index was read, and the minutes that mattered turned out to be in blocks the loop had not got back round to. One copy went off to be watched and a second into the claim file. Nine days is a long time to leave that to chance, and it is exactly why we say pull the plug on day one.

The entire break-in window came back off the disk3 days between arrival and return

What helps, and what does damage.

Worth doing first

  • Get the recorder off the mains
  • Note which cameras, and which times
  • Post the disk by itself and keep the box
  • Say who the copy is for, and confirm the work is yours to authorise

What makes it harder

  • Leaving it running while you think it over
  • Deleting old clips to free up space
  • Firmware updates, or a factory reset
  • Trying the failed export again and again

What gets asked before posting.

Is deleted CCTV footage still recoverable?

Usually, yes. It turns on one thing: whether somebody took the supply off before the loop came round to that part of the disk again. Deleting a clip edits the catalogue and leaves the picture exactly where it lies, and there it stays until newer video takes those same blocks.

What if it has already recorded over them?

Then it has gone. New video occupies those blocks and there is no older layer sitting underneath — not here, and not at any other laboratory. Which is why one instruction opens every call we take: get the supply off.

The recorder itself has stopped. Does the video stop with it?

Rarely. Three things sit inside a DVR — the case, the board and the hard disk — and video has only ever gone onto the last of them. So a board past repair is a nuisance rather than a barrier: the disk comes out, an image is taken, and everything after that runs on the image.

How much time have I got?

Disk size, camera count and bitrate settle it between them, and no two systems land in the same place. A forecourt with movement in front of every lens comes back round to its own oldest hour far sooner than the owner expects. Treat the clock as running while the box still has power.

Start here if the same thing is happening to yours.

Deleted clips, and what survives → Copies insurers and police accept → How long you have left → When the recorder's drive fails → The disc that will not open → The disk inside the computer → Jobs that end up in court →

Power the recorder down before the loop reaches your clip.

Cut the power to the DVR before anything else — while it runs it keeps writing, and the oldest footage goes first. Then post it in. The first look is free, CCTV and DVR work is £400 + VAT quoted in writing before anything starts, and what is on that disk goes no further than the bench.

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