A surveillance recorder's drive had failed before key footage could be exported — recovered and rebuilt from a proprietary format.
A business needed footage from its CCTV system after an incident, only to find the DVR's hard drive had failed and the recordings could no longer be played back or exported. It happens more than people expect. Surveillance recorders write continuously, around the clock, to a drive that never gets a break, so those drives wear out and fail far faster than an ordinary computer's — and they store their video in a manufacturer-specific format rather than a standard file system, so a failed DVR drive can't simply be plugged into a PC and read.
The drive was tired and heavily used, with the read trouble you'd expect from a disk that had recorded non-stop for years. There were really two problems: first recover the failing drive itself, then make sense of the proprietary recording format once a stable copy was in hand. Neither could be rushed if the footage was to come back usable.
We recovered the drive first, imaging a worn, heavily-used disk gently on a DeepSpar Disk Imager — reading the healthy areas first and taking the weak ones in controlled passes — with the PC3000 on hand for firmware. With a full image safely taken, we then decoded the DVR's proprietary recording format, carving the video streams out of the raw data and rebuilding them into standard, playable footage. We matched the recovered video to the dates and times the customer needed, so the relevant period could be found quickly.
We verified the rebuilt clips played back cleanly and spanned the window the customer was after, then delivered them in an everyday format they could open and share with no need for the original DVR.
The required footage was recovered and supplied in a playable form within five working days, along with the surrounding recordings from the same period. The practical lesson for anyone relying on CCTV is to check it's actually recording and to export important footage promptly — the drive inside a DVR is a consumable working hard around the clock, and it will fail in time like any other.
DeepSpar DDI · PC3000 — imaging and recovery carried out in-house. Every job is imaged before any recovery work begins, and the original media is never written to.
Send us your device for a free diagnostic, and tell us a little about what happened — an engineer will review it and confirm your exact quote in writing before any work begins.
Getting your data back begins with getting the device to us. Pack it up safely, pop your contact details inside, and send it over — once we’ve run the free diagnostic, we’ll confirm your exact price in writing before any work starts.
Posting it? A tracked, insured service is what we’d recommend. Rather drop it in? You’re welcome Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm — just package the device up as above first.
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Yes. We recover the DVR's hard drive first, then decode its proprietary recording format and rebuild the footage into standard, playable video covering the dates you need.
£800 plus VAT, with no fix, no fee on most jobs and a fixed quote up front.
Often, yes — deleted and overwritten footage can frequently be carved back off the drive. Stop the recorder and bring the DVR, or its drive, in to us.
Start with an instant online quote, or call and talk it through with us first. You'll have a clear, fixed price before any work begins.