Investigations & evidence · deleted DVR recordings
Everything turns on one thing: how long the recorder has kept running since. A menu delete removes a row from the unit's index and leaves the video blocks sitting untouched, waiting their turn as the loop comes round again. Pull the power soon enough and most of the footage comes back still tagged with the camera and the time it was made. After the loop has been over it, nothing does.
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| What shows up | What has gone wrong | Do this now |
|---|---|---|
| Somebody deleted the recordings on the box | One index row disappeared; the pictures stayed put | Unplug it immediately |
| The recorder reformatted itself after a fault | Formatting creates an empty index and little more | Carving handles that well, so the odds are good |
| The box recorded on for days | Each further hour of recording chews deeper into the earliest footage | Post the drive today |
| The earliest recording postdates what you need | Almost certainly overwritten; the free check settles it | We tell you at no cost |
| Clips play with no camera name or clock | Carving keeps the pictures but loses the labels | Normal, and flagged on your file list |
| A previous job left files that will not open | Bare video streams came out but were never wrapped up | We rebuild them into MP4 files that play |
The diagnosis costs you nothing. Every item that arrives is logged under a case number of its own, and an engineer works out what has actually failed — then tells you plainly which files can come back and which cannot. The price follows that: one fixed figure, in writing, and no work begins until you have read it and said go ahead.
The recorder comes off power, the drive comes out, and it is imaged through a write blocker. Nothing further can slip away after that — every block the loop had yet to revisit is held safe on our image.
Everything from here runs on the image. We hunt for the manufacturer's own filesystem — HIKBTREE on a Hikvision, DHFS on a Dahua — and if enough of it is readable, the export comes out with genuine channel names, dates and times on it. That is the version a loss adjuster accepts.
Where there is no structure left, the image is scanned end to end for the markers that begin each compressed frame in H.264 or H.265, and whatever surfaces is assembled into clips a player will open. Your file list shows which of them held on to their timing and which arrived without.
Nothing is billed while you are still deciding. A complete listing of what came off the drive reaches you first, and the invoice only follows your yes. Files travel back on media bought new for the job, return postage ours, and we do not close it here until every one of them opens on the machine you will use.
What loop recording really does: the disk is divided into equal blocks and filled in order, one after the next. Reach the last block and the recorder returns to the first, writing straight over whatever sits there. A deleted clip therefore lives only until the write head works its way round to that spot again — which is the reason cutting the power counts as the recovery itself, not a precaution.
Someone on the counter had cleared out what looked like stale footage. A theft was in among it. The recorder was switched off within hours, and that is the reason there was anything left: four of the five missing days still had index entries and their timestamps, and the fifth was carved out as video that plays, with no label on it.
Generally, yes. Deleting takes out the recorder's catalogue entry and nothing more; the disk blocks holding the pictures sit exactly where they were until loop recording returns to them. Kill the power and nothing shifts.
Because the new recording occupies the very blocks the old one used, and a disk platter holds one state per block, not two. Anybody guaranteeing a result in that situation is selling you something.
Frequently, provided enough of the maker's index survives to be read. Where we have to carve frames directly out of the sectors instead, the images return but the labelling often does not — and your file list marks exactly which clips came back bare.
That depends on how many cameras, at what quality, onto how large a disk. Some premises keep two weeks, others several months. More cameras and more movement in front of them mean the oldest footage goes sooner.
While that recorder keeps writing, the clip you need is being covered over — and your deadline has not moved. Book it in. The first look is free, and it stays private.