Hard Drive Recovery
The files are still
on the media.
Specialist recovery in Sydney. Angus Lewington answers the phone and does the recovery work himself. Free assessment, then a fixed quote before anything starts. Makers of Recovery Studio, plus remote help when the drive can stay with you.
Lab · Recovery Studio · Remote help · Free assessment
Before you do anything else
Protect the only copy.
- 01
Power it down
Every minute a failing drive runs can overwrite the bytes you need.
- 02
Skip consumer scanners
Desktop recovery apps write as they scan. That is the opposite of imaging a dying disk.
- 03
No repair, no format
chkdsk, First Aid and reinstall fix the disk; they do not preserve what was on it.
- 04
Call, then decide
Free triage: lab job, cleanroom referral, or Recovery Studio.
The Sydney lab
One examiner. Read-only from the first byte.
Angus Lewington answers the phone and does the work. Your original is imaged sector by sector; recovery runs on the copy.
Integrity
Image first
Hardware for unstable media. Cleanroom cases referred honestly at assessment.
Depth
Rebuild, don’t hope
Filesystems, RAID members, proprietary CCTV: past where consumer tools stop.
Software
Recovery Studio
The Mac app we use in the lab: own-media work, coverage proof, copy-only export.
How a recovery works
Triage, image, recover, verify, return.
Nothing is charged until you have seen a fixed quote for your actual device and agreed to it.
- 01
Triage
You tell us what happened. We tell you what is likely, free, before anything is touched.
- 02
Image
The device is copied sector by sector on hardware built for failing media. Read-only, always.
- 03
Recover
All work happens on that copy. Filesystems rebuilt, deleted entries carved, video containers parsed.
- 04
Verify
You get a list of what came back before you pay for the recovery.
- 05
Return
Files delivered on new media, with a written account of what was done.
CCTV specialists
Told the footage has been recorded over? On one recent NVR, 10.74 GB was still there.
A recorder claims space in large fixed zones and writes into a zone until it moves on. When a zone is only part filled, the rest of it is never touched, and the older recording is still sitting there behind the write pointer. A drive that has lapped is not a blank drive.
On one recent NVR we measured 10.74 GB of previous footage still readable across 3,705 zones, before carving a byte. A 200 MB sample of it decoded to 7 minutes 49 seconds of 4K. On another recorder we recovered 94,104 clips the unit's own index had stopped listing.
- Hikvision, Dahua, Uniview, TP-Link VIGI, Reolink, Xiongmai-family and rebadges, parsed as the formats they are
- What survives measured and quoted before the work starts, not after
- The part genuinely written over is gone. We say so, and we say it first
If the unit is still recording, stopping it is worth more than any expedited handling, and it costs nothing. What we get back after an overwrite.
Pricing
Published figures, then a fixed quote.
Lab recovery from $249. CCTV quoted after assessment. Evidence work $195/hr. Assessment is free. No recovery, no fee on lab jobs. Full table on Pricing. Software licences are separate: Recovery Studio Basic $499, Technician $7,500/year (normally $8,999), or $25,000 lifetime — detail on Recovery Studio.
Services
What we recover from.
-
Hard drives
Internal and external, any interface
-
Specialists
CCTV & DVR
Proprietary formats ordinary scanners miss
-
SSDs & NVMe
Including drives the BIOS no longer sees
-
Phones & tablets
Android depth; iOS from backups and working devices
-
SD & memory cards
Cameras, dashcams, drones
-
RAID, NAS & servers
Rebuilt from member disks
Limits
What we will not pretend.
We do not run a cleanroom. Clicking, seized or head-crashed drives are assessed free, then referred. We will not open the only copy on a bench.
We do not publish success percentages. A number measured on other people’s drives tells you nothing about yours. We look at yours and say what is recoverable.
Next step
Tell us what failed.
Free assessment. Fixed quote before recovery starts. No recovery, no fee. Sydney drop-off or Australia-wide by tracked post.