The break-in is on the recorder — but the recorder is broken, the drive pulled by an insurer, or the loop is overwriting the incident while everyone deliberates. Surveillance recovery is drive work plus two twists: proprietary formats no ordinary tool reads, and a clock that never stops. When footage matters, speed and the right bench both count.
$ edr connecting…
Plug a DVR’s drive into a computer and you’ll usually see nothing usable: surveillance recorders write raw H.264/H.265 streams into proprietary structures — often no conventional file system at all, just indexed blocks per camera per timeslot. Recovery means reading those structures natively: reconstructing the recorder’s index (or rebuilding it from the streams when it’s damaged), extracting by camera and time window, and converting to standard playable files with timestamps preserved. Hikvision, Dahua, Swann, and the white-label army built on their platforms are all familiar structures here; failed drives get the standard imaging discipline first, format archaeology second.
Surveillance systems overwrite oldest-first, forever — which means an incident’s footage has a shelf life measured in days on busy multi-camera systems. The moment footage matters: stop the recorder (or at least the recording), note the incident’s date, time and cameras, and get the drive out and to the bench — labelled if there are several. For insurance and legal uses, say so at intake: extraction is then documented — what was recovered, from where, how — in a form that survives scrutiny, and our forensic service takes over where formal evidential handling is required.
Depends entirely on the system's retention: a lightly-used recorder may hold months; a busy 16-camera loop may hold days. Stop it recording now — every hour writes over the oldest hour — and the diagnostic maps exactly what time range survives per camera.
Frequently: menu deletion typically drops index entries while the stream data persists until overwritten. This is the strongest argument for pulling the drive promptly. Recovery rebuilds from the streams themselves, deleted or not, within whatever the loop hasn't reclaimed.
Recovered footage exports as standard playable files with original timestamps, plus documentation of the recovery. For police or court use, tell us at intake — handling then follows evidential practice (imaging, hashes, chain of custody) via our forensic service, and the paperwork matches the purpose.