Before a firm could pull the footage it needed, the disk inside its DVR gave out. We rescued that drive and turned the recorder’s own storage format back into clips any media player will open.
After an incident, staff at a business sat down to review their CCTV and found the opposite of what they expected: the DVR’s disk had died, and not one recording would open or export. That scenario is commoner than you’d think. The point to grasp is that a security recorder is writing every second it’s switched on, day and night, onto a disk that gets no rest — which wears those disks out and kills them well ahead of a drive in a desktop. And the video isn’t laid down in any normal file system; each maker uses a scheme of its own, so lifting the disk into a computer gets you nowhere by itself.
That disk was worn out and hard-run, throwing up exactly the read errors a drive earns after years of round-the-clock recording. So the work fell into two halves: get the failing disk safely copied, and only afterwards make sense of the maker’s recording scheme from that copy. Rush either half and the footage comes back broken, so neither was.
The disk was tackled first. A worn, hard-used platter calls for restraint, so it went onto a DeepSpar for imaging — the readable zones taken early, the fragile ones coaxed across in slow, measured runs — while the PC3000 stood ready for firmware trouble. Only once the whole disk sat safely inside an image did we turn to the format: unpicking the DVR’s encoding, drawing the video streams clear of the raw bytes, and reassembling them into clips that play on anything. Last of all we aligned those clips to the calendar dates and clock times the client had set out, so the stretch they were chasing could be jumped straight to.
With the clips reassembled, we made sure they ran smoothly and covered the whole span the client had asked about, then handed them over in a commonplace format they could view and pass on with the DVR left out of it entirely.
Inside five working days the clips they had come for were back and playable, bundled together with the neighbouring recordings from the same window. Anyone leaning on CCTV should take two things from this: look in on it every so often to be sure it’s truly capturing, and get anything that matters off it sooner rather than later — the disk in a DVR is a wear part, grinding away without pause, and in the end it gives out like any drive will.
DeepSpar DDI · PC3000 — the tired surveillance disk imaged with care, its DVR encoding then unpicked and the video reassembled into clips that play. Nothing is ever written back to the source disk; we work solely from the copy.
Get the device to us for a free diagnostic and a quick note on what went wrong — an engineer looks it over and puts your exact quote in writing before anything is started.
The route to your data starts with the device reaching us. Box it up securely, tuck your contact details inside, and send it across — after the free diagnostic, we put your exact price in writing before a single step is taken.
Sending it by post? Go with a tracked, insured service. Prefer to bring it round? Our door is open Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm — just pack the device as described above beforehand.
Prefer to get a sense of things first? Complete the form with a bit more about the fault and an engineer will look it over and send back a tailored quote.
We’ll get back to you soon. Anything pressing, call 01483 901310.
Yes. First we rescue the recorder’s disk, then unpick its maker format and reassemble the footage into ordinary, playable video spanning whatever dates you’re after.
It’s £800 plus VAT; most jobs run on no fix, no fee, and you get a fixed quote before we begin.
Sometimes — footage the recorder has deleted or written over can in many cases be carved back off the disk, though not always. Switch the DVR off and bring it over, or just the drive from inside it.
Kick off with an instant online quote, or ring us and talk it through first. Either way you’ll know a clear, fixed price before any work starts.