CCTV storage has one habit no other device shares: it deliberately erases itself, forever, on a schedule. Loop recording overwrites the oldest footage every day the system keeps running — which means after an incident, the recorder faithfully doing its job is the biggest threat to the evidence. The first move in CCTV recovery is always the same: stop the recording.
Every system has a retention span — a fortnight, thirty days, ninety — set by disk size and camera count, and the incident clip lives exactly that long before the loop returns for its space. The moment footage matters: power the recorder down or pull the recording drive, note the incident date and camera numbers, and stop anyone “checking the system is still working”, which is how crucial hours get overwritten while everyone watches the monitor.
Already past the window? Not automatically hopeless — overwriting is uneven, and fragments of “expired” footage regularly survive in the gaps. Worth an honest look before anyone concludes anything.
Pull a DVR drive and connect it to a computer and you’ll see an apparently blank or “unformatted” disk — because HikVision, Dahua, Swann and the rest write their own storage schemes, not Windows file systems. The footage is there in full; the PC simply doesn’t speak the dialect. We do: the proprietary structures are parsed directly from an image of the drive, streams are demuxed per camera and per timeframe, and the output is standard, playable video — not an export the dead recorder can no longer make.
The same applies when the recorder itself has died or been damaged: the box is optional, the drive is the witness.
CCTV jobs usually end in front of someone — police, an insurer, a tribunal — so delivery is built for that: requested windows exported camera-by-camera with timestamps preserved, on write-once media where needed, with a plain statement of how the footage was recovered. If a specific evidential format or a hash-verified copy is required, say so at the start and it’s handled as part of the job, not a bolt-on.
CCTV, DVR and NVR recovery is a fixed £800 + VAT, whatever the fault turns out to be; the rare chip-level exception is quoted in writing first. Everything starts with a free diagnostic, the figure goes in writing before work begins, and on most jobs nothing is owed unless the data comes back. No hourly meter, no evaluation fee, no percentage of what the files are worth.
Stop it recording — either power the unit down or pull the storage drive — and write down the incident time and which cameras cover it. Every hour it keeps running, the loop eats toward your clip. Then get the drive (or the whole recorder) to us; exporting can wait, preservation cannot.
Almost never — the recorder is just the pen; the drive is the notebook. We read the disk directly, parse the proprietary format on the bench, and deliver the footage as playable files. Remove the drive from the recorder before sending — on most units it slides out on a caddy in seconds — and post the drive itself.
Frequently, yes — deletion on these systems typically drops index entries while the video data waits for the loop to reclaim it, so speed decides. Pull the drive now and note roughly when the deletion happened. Recovering deliberately-removed footage for evidential use is a familiar request, handled with the paperwork to match.
Yes — that’s the normal shape of the job. Give us the date, window and camera numbers and the export is cut to exactly that, timestamps intact, per-camera files, playable anywhere. Whole-system dumps are available when investigations want everything, but most cases need a scalpel, not a skip.
Two honest routes, no vans. Hand the device in at Tay House, 300 Bath Street — right at Charing Cross, two minutes off the M8 — Monday to Friday, 9am–5:30pm. Or wrap it well and send it by insured, tracked post from anywhere in the UK. The work is done in-house by our own engineers, with a documented chain of custody, and your data never leaves the UK.
The loop doesn’t know it’s holding evidence — you do. CCTV footage recovery for Glasgow: drive or whole recorder, HikVision to Dahua, delivered playable and paperwork-ready. Charing Cross or insured post, today beats tomorrow.