The cameras did what they were installed to do. Then the recorder gave up, or the loop came round and wrote over the week in question, or somebody pressed reset while tidying an office. Recorder and NVR disks are read here for homes, shops, pubs, insurers and legal firms right across Coventry and Warwickshire, including the yards and depots by the M6 and M69 junctions, where a camera on a pole is often the only witness there is.
Looking at a disk out of a CCTV or DVR recorder costs nothing. What comes out of that examination is one written figure, agreed between us before anybody picks up a screwdriver: £400 + VAT on a disk lifted out of a CCTV or DVR recorder.
Logical work is no fix, no fee. Four things sit outside that: electronic and mechanical failures, chip-level work, DVR jobs and forensic work, and anything physical is half up front. All five bands are laid out on the data recovery cost page, while data recovery services follows a postal job from the parcel to the answer.
Tracing a symptom back to whatever caused it is where the job genuinely starts, and these thirty cover very nearly every box opened on the Oxford bench. A fault that is not on the list is not an unfamiliar one: describe it over the telephone and you will get a straight reading of the odds before you have spent a penny on postage.
A message about no hard disk, or a menu that offers to format one, means the drive has stopped answering the recorder. Most of these boxes run a cheap controller with no diagnostics worth the name, so a drive it cannot read may still read perfectly well on a proper port. The footage is on that disk and it does not need the box to get at it.
Continuous recording fills the disk and then starts replacing the oldest footage, and on a small drive with several cameras that can be a matter of days. If the recorder has kept running since the event, part or all of what you want has been genuinely replaced. Unplugging the box the moment something happens is the single most valuable thing anybody can do.
Deleting a clip removes it from the index and generally leaves the video data where it was until the loop comes round again. That is why these are worth attempting, and why the odds fall every hour the system stays powered. Take the disk out rather than looking for a setting that undoes it.
Thieves who know what they are doing take the box with them, and the ones who do not put a boot through it. Where the disk survives, the footage on it is readable even though the recorder is scrap. Where the disk itself is damaged, it is treated like any other mechanically failed drive, on the clean bench.
A service call, a firmware update or a reconfiguration can reinitialise the storage, and the person who did it will often say the disk was already faulty. New index structures over the top of old footage still leave the video data present in most cases. Say what was done and when, because it decides where the work starts.
Recorders export in their own containers with their own codecs, and the player supplied on a disc in 2011 will not install on a current machine. This is one of the most common calls on this page and it is frequently the cheapest to answer, because the footage is intact and only the wrapper is the problem.
The status page reports a healthy drive and the timeline is empty, which usually means the index has been damaged while the video data underneath is still there. Recorders have no tools for this and no interest in the distinction. Reading the disk directly and carving the footage out by its own structure is exactly the work this bench does.
The video survives and the metadata that placed it in time does not, so what comes back is a set of clips with no timeline. Timestamps can often be reconstructed from the recorder's own layout and from what is burned into the frames themselves, and where they cannot, you are told so before the job is agreed.
Surveillance drives run continuously for years in warm cupboards, and when they fail mechanically they fail like any other disk. Once it is clicking, the recorder trying repeatedly to read it makes matters worse each time. Pull the power, take the disk out, and do not put it back in to check.
Installers put these where they fit rather than where they should go: an airing cupboard, a ceiling void, a locked cabinet in a workshop with no ventilation. Drives in those conditions run twenty degrees over their rating for years, and they wear out silently long before anybody looks at the box.
Recorders write constantly, so losing power mid-write leaves the file system inconsistent, and many of these boxes respond by offering to format. Decline that. The video data is nearly always still present behind a damaged index, and the recovery starts from the disk rather than from the recorder's own repair option.
Larger systems spread recording across several drives, which means no single disk holds a complete picture. All of them are needed, labelled with the bay they came from. That is array work starting at 500 pounds + VAT rather than the single recorder band, and it is quoted once the layout has been established.
Wireless and standalone cameras write to a card in the unit rather than to a recorder. Cards are the 250 pounds + VAT band and they are handled on the memory card bench. The commonest fault by a distance is not damage at all but a cheap card that has been quietly overwriting itself for months.
Claims, licensing reviews and police requests all come with dates attached. Say so when you ring and the job is moved up the list. What does not bend is the physics: the free diagnostic still needs two working days from the disk being booked in, and anybody promising footage by the morning is inventing a timescale.
The installer set it, the installer has moved on, and the menu will not open. That is a problem for the recorder and not for the recovery, because the disk is read directly and the box's password never comes into it. Take the drive out and send that instead of trying to reset the unit.
An engineer swaps a failing drive, hands the old one over, and eighteen months later something on it is needed. Those disks are frequently readable, and the fact that the recorder rejected it says very little. Send the old disk with a note of which system it came out of and roughly which years it covers.
A recording that plays for ten minutes and then halts usually means unreadable sectors in the middle of the file rather than a fault with the clip. Imaging with retries under control recovers the readable material either side, and the gap is reported honestly rather than papered over.
A drive announcing itself as 32MB, or as something no manufacturer has ever sold, has a firmware fault rather than a damaged mechanism. The recorded footage is sitting behind that fault untouched. A service terminal walks the drive back out, and the correct capacity and contents return with it.
Dashcams write constantly to a small card and wear it out, and many carry on showing a light after they have stopped saving anything. If an incident happened after the card gave up, there is nothing on it, and that is established during the free assessment rather than after a bill.
Some of these keep a card that can be taken out and some have flash soldered into the unit. Where a card comes out it is card work at 250 pounds + VAT. Where the storage is soldered down, it is declined for the same reason a phone is: there is nothing that can be removed and read.
Sensitivity set too low, a zone drawn in the wrong place, or a camera that was pointing slightly off. The system worked exactly as configured and recorded nothing of interest. This is worth checking before spending anything, because no amount of bench work creates footage that was never written.
Cameras live, monitor showing pictures, and no disk fitted or no schedule enabled. It is more common than it sounds, particularly on systems installed cheaply and never checked. It is also the one outcome nobody can do anything about, and it is better established in a phone call than after postage.
Some boxes use one drive for current recording and another for archive, or fill one before starting the next. Send both, labelled with the bay each came from, and say roughly what period you need. Sending only one and hoping is how a job comes back covering the wrong fortnight.
A drive that has stood cold and damp on a shelf can seize, and heads can bond to the platters. That disk is inspected on the bench before power is offered, because one hopeful start does more harm than the two years of storage did.
Systems from the PATA era are still running in yards, workshops and shop back rooms across the county. The disks are small, the file systems are early and awkward, and the adapters for both are here. Age makes a job less predictable rather than impossible.
Where material is going to a solicitor, an insurer or the police as evidence, it needs a documented chain of custody, a verified image and a written account of what was done. That is forensic work at 800 pounds + VAT with a full report, or 400 pounds + VAT for a binary image with deleted-file extraction and no report. Say at the outset if that is what you need.
Administrators, landlords and former directors all ask for footage from systems nobody is maintaining any more. The disk is what matters and the box is not needed. Establishing who is entitled to ask for the material is worth doing before the parcel is sent rather than after the work is finished.
A unit sent off for repair frequently returns with a fresh disk or a formatted one, and the original footage goes with it. If the old drive still exists, ask for it. If the same disk was formatted, a format usually leaves the video data present underneath, and that is worth a look.
Larger sites record to a Windows server or a NAS instead of a dedicated box, which puts ordinary files on an ordinary file system and makes the job a computer recovery rather than a recorder one. Say which arrangement you have when you ring, because it changes both the method and the band the price sits in.
Somebody has burned a disc or copied a folder off the recorder, and it will not open anywhere. Where the original system is still running, the simplest answer is often to export again in a different format. Where it is not, the files can usually be converted here into something that will play.
A recorder fills its disk and then starts again at the beginning, and on a busy multi-camera installation the round trip can be days rather than weeks. If the incident is still on the platter it comes back. If the system has carried on recording for a fortnight, much of it has genuinely been replaced and nobody can produce what no longer exists. So the useful action is the one people skip, because the cameras are still wanted: take the recorder off power. The same applies where clips were deleted through the box's own menu, since deleting removes the recorder's index entry and leaves the video lying where it was until the loop reaches it. Time rather than damage is what turns a recoverable clip into a lost one. Pull the disk, fit a spare if the site has to stay covered, and send the original. One other thing catches out a great many owners: a recorder will happily run for months with a failed or unformatted disk in it, showing a live picture on the monitor the whole time and storing nothing at all. That gets discovered on the day the footage is needed.
Hikvision, Dahua, Swann, Samsung, Bosch and a long list of unbranded boxes each lay their footage down in an arrangement of their own devising, which is why a recorder disk plugged into a computer normally reports itself as unformatted or empty. Nothing is wrong with it; the layout is simply one Windows has never met, and it is read here directly rather than through the recorder. Where the box's index has been wiped or damaged, the video is recovered by recognising the structure of the frames themselves, which works regardless of what the index says. That leaves timing as the remaining problem, since material carved without an index carries no obvious clock, so the sequence is rebuilt from frame headers and the order in which the disk was written. It matters most when the footage is going to an insurer or into a hearing. The final step is conversion: what comes back is standard video that opens on any computer, rather than a proprietary export only the manufacturer's own player understands, which is a common reason footage gets handed back as unusable.
A recorder disk is an ordinary drive carrying an extraordinary file system, and both halves of that have to be dealt with. The bench handles the hardware exactly as it would any other disk, then starts on a layout that owes nothing to Windows, macOS or Linux.
Surveillance drives are written to every second of their lives and wear in bands rather than evenly. Imaging is done with hardware retries under control and the difficult regions deferred, so the healthy bulk of the recording is banked before anything is spent on the parts that fight back.
Hikvision, Dahua and the dozens of boxes built on their platforms each store video in their own way, as do Swann, Hanwha and the older analogue units. Layouts collected over years are on hand here, which is the difference between reading a recorder disk and guessing at one.
When the structure that lists recordings is damaged, the video is found by its own frame signatures instead and reassembled into clips. That works on disks a recorder has given up on entirely, and it is the reason a box reporting an empty timeline is not the end of the enquiry.
Clips are put back in order using the recorder's own storage layout and whatever is burned into the frames. Camera channel, date and time are recovered together where the format allows it. Where they cannot be recovered, you are told which clips are unplaced rather than being handed a guess.
This is the honest part of the page. A proprietary format sometimes yields footage in a form no ordinary player will open, and where that happens the material is converted into a standard container, or supplied with the original files and a plain account of what is needed to view them. What is not done is handing over something unplayable and calling it a recovery.
Recorder disks fail mechanically more often than most, because they run hot and never stop. Head replacement, donor matching and platter work all happen under filtered air, and that work takes 50% up front and sits outside no fix, no fee along with the rest of the recorder band.
One recorder disk is 400 pounds + VAT, sharing a band with encrypted drives. Where an NVR spread its recording across several drives, that is an array and begins at 500 pounds + VAT. A camera or dashcam card sits in the 250 pounds + VAT band. Nothing is charged for the examination, which closes two working days after the drive is logged in. DVR jobs appear by name among the published exclusions from no fix, no fee, and that belongs near the top of a page rather than in a footnote, because it is what anybody sending a recorder disk deserves to hear first. The drive travels and the recorder stays where it is: it is heavy, nothing at this end needs it, and every frame you want is on the disk. Two things govern how much can be handed back. One is how long the cameras carried on recording after the event, since the loop eats the oldest material first. The other is whether anyone agreed to a format or a factory reset in the meantime. Pull the plug at the wall, take the disk out, and ring 0800 689 0668 if there is a deadline attached.
Almost everything worked on here arrived in the post. A drive that is already in trouble has an easier time boxed, padded and insured than it does being carried round in a bag for an afternoon, and a parcel handed over in Coventry today is normally booked in at Oxford tomorrow morning.
As a rule the storage comes out and the machine stays where it is. That applies to a laptop, a tower, an iMac and to the recorder sitting under a counter. Taking equipment apart is not something this bench does, and a repair shop will free a drive in a few minutes. Two things go the other way: an external drive stays sealed inside its own case, and a NAS travels as a complete unit with its disks still in their bays. A Fusion Mac is a third case — both of its drives come out and travel together, each one labelled. The single situation nobody can work around is memory soldered flat onto a mainboard, which is how Apple Silicon Macs and a good many slim laptops are built: if the storage will not unbolt, there is no parcel to send.
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Put Oxford Data Recovery on the label. From Coventry it is roughly fifty-five miles straight down the M40, about an hour if you would rather drive it in than post it. Either way you are told the moment it is logged, and the free diagnostic finishes two working days later.
Unsure what ought to go in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you seal it, or work through the free online diagnostic and let it do the asking.
Looking at it costs nothing, one written figure follows, and the band governing this page is £400 + VAT on a disk lifted out of a CCTV or DVR recorder.