Troubleshooting
CCTV is not recording
The three common causes are a failed hard drive, a recording schedule that was switched off, and a full drive with overwrite disabled. All three are inexpensive to fix. Check the recorder's storage page first — if the drive shows as missing or unformatted, that is your answer.
Check the drive status
Recorders show drive health on a storage page. A drive listed as missing, unformatted or with errors is the cause. Surveillance drives wear out in three to five years of continuous writing.
Check the schedule
Recording schedules get switched off during troubleshooting and never switched back. It costs nothing to check and it is more common than a drive failure.
Check overwrite
If overwrite is disabled and the drive is full, recording simply stops. Enabling overwrite resumes it immediately, at the cost of losing the oldest footage.
Why is my CCTV not recording?
How do I know if the hard drive has failed?
The recorder usually reports it on the storage page, and often beeps. If footage exists up to a specific date and nothing after, that date is usually when the drive gave up.
Can I recover footage from a failed CCTV drive?
Sometimes, depending on the failure. We attempt recovery before replacing a drive when the footage matters, but a drive that has been writing over a fault for weeks is often beyond it.
Need this doing?
Security camera repair covers cameras showing no image, recorders that stopped recording, footage you cannot retrieve, and systems that lost remote viewing. Most faults are power, cable or configuration rather than a failed camera. Diagnosis is free, and we quote a fixed price before doing any work.
Security camera repair — what it costsRelated pages
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