Investigations & evidence · how long footage lasts
A recorder fills its disk, goes back to the start, and records over the oldest material it holds. Nothing is deleted and nothing is put in a bin. It is simply replaced, hour after hour, for as long as the unit has power. No one can tell you from the outside how many days that leaves you. What we can tell you is how to stop it, and it takes about ten seconds.
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| What you see | What the fault is | What to try |
|---|---|---|
| The recorder is still on | It is writing over the oldest material while it runs | Take the power off |
| You do not know how far back it goes | Disk size, camera count and settings all move it | Read the oldest date |
| One camera goes back further | A quiet channel on motion recording fills slowly | Check every channel, not one |
| The recorder failed a fortnight ago | A unit that cannot write cannot overwrite either | Leave it off, send the disk |
| The night you want has gone | Fragments can survive outside the index | The free check settles it either way |
| No claim or investigation has started yet | A request in writing will take longer than the loop | Get a copy made now |
Each item that arrives gets a case number the day it lands. An engineer looks at it and finds the real fault, and that costs you nothing. You are told in plain terms which files can come off the drive and which cannot. A price follows — one figure, written down. No work starts until you have seen it and agreed to it.
The first job is to take the recorder out of service, not to look at it. The drive comes out and is copied block by block behind a write blocker. From that moment the position is fixed: whatever the loop had not reached is held in the image, and no more of it can go.
The image is read for what is genuinely on it — the earliest recording still there, the latest, and any gap between. On a partly written-over disk that shows which half-hours came through and which did not, and you get it as a list before other work starts.
What came back is written to fresh media as an exhibit: the recorder's own files, a copy that plays on any machine, MD5 and SHA-256 values for each, and a dated record of who has held what. That is the form an insurer or an investigating officer is expecting. It also means the footage exists apart from the recorder from that day on, so the unit can go back into service and the loop stops mattering.
You are not billed while you are still thinking. The list of what came off the drive goes to you first, and the invoice waits on your word. Files go home on media bought in for the job, with the postage back on us. We keep the job open until you have opened them on your own machine.
The one action that stops it: take the power off. Not the menu, not a setting, not a call to the installer — the switch on the wall. Everything after that can go at your own pace. If the cameras have to stay live because the site needs watching, export the period you want to a USB stick first, keep the recorder's own files rather than a re-encoded copy, and ring us before the disk is touched. What does not work is leaving it running and hoping, because each hour it runs costs the oldest hour on the disk.
A break-in over a Sunday night. The manager found the shutter up, switched the recorder off at the wall before opening, and rang that morning. The disk was on the bench by Tuesday and imaged before anything was read out of it. The whole night came back with its camera names and times, and the insurer had it inside the week. What surprised them was how little the disk was actually holding.
Nobody can say without looking at it. It turns on the size of the disk, how many cameras write to it, the resolution, the frame rate and whether it runs all the time or only on movement. Your playback calendar shows the oldest date still there. Read it today.
No. Once new video has been written to those blocks, the earlier recording is not on the disk in any form, and no software and no laboratory alters that. Where only part of the period was written across, fragments outside the index often survive and are worth carving for. Which of those two you are looking at is settled by the free check, at no cost.
Yes, if you can manage without the cover for a day or two. Switching it off at the mains is the one thing that reliably stops the overwriting, and it costs nothing. If the site has to stay watched, export the period you want to a USB stick first, keep the native files, and ring before anything else is touched.
Secure it anyway. A claim or an investigation moves in weeks; a recorder moves at whatever its settings allow, which is usually a good deal less. By the time a request arrives in writing, the period it asks about can already have been passed over. A copy taken now costs little and answers the question either way.
The clip you want is being written over while you read this, and the deadline has not shifted. Log a job. The first look costs nothing, and what you tell us stays private.