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 is a more common situation than people expect. Surveillance recorders write continuously, around the clock, to a drive that never gets a rest, so the drives wear out and fail at a far higher rate than an ordinary computer's — and they store their video in a manufacturer-specific format rather than a standard file system, which means a failed DVR drive can't simply be plugged into a PC and read.
The drive was tired and heavily used, with the read problems you would expect from a disk that had been recording non-stop for years. There were really two challenges here: first recover the failing drive itself, and then make sense of the proprietary recording format once a stable copy had been obtained. 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 handling the weak ones in controlled passes — with the PC3000 on hand for firmware. With a full image safely taken, we then interpreted 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 located quickly.
We confirmed the rebuilt footage played correctly and covered the period required, then supplied it in a standard format the customer could open and share without 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 is actually recording and to export important footage promptly — the drive inside a DVR is a consumable working hard at all times, and it will eventually fail 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.
Recovering your data starts with getting the device to us. Pack it safely, add your contact details, and send it over — after we run a free diagnostic, we’ll confirm your exact price in writing before any work begins.
Posting it in? We recommend a tracked, insured service. Prefer to drop it off? You’re welcome Monday–Friday, 9am–5:30pm — please still package the device as above.
If you need more information on our data recovery service, fill out the form with more detail about your issue and an engineer will review it and give you a custom quote.
We’ll be in touch shortly. For anything urgent, call 0117 332 1137.
Yes. We recover the DVR's hard drive, then interpret its proprietary recording format to rebuild the footage into standard, playable video for the dates you need.
From £400 plus VAT, no fix, no fee on most jobs, with a fixed quote first.
Often, yes — deleted and overwritten footage can frequently be carved back from the drive. Stop recording and bring the DVR or its drive in.
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.