Category: Product Features

Data recovery is a key function of DVR Examiner for all our users, despite varying case load and case nature. An efficient workflow, and the ability for users to customize the workflow they follow based on their particular case needs, ensures rapid time to evidence, and is a major focus as we release new versions of DVR Examiner.

Data recovery with DVR Examiner works by reverse engineering the many different DVR filesystems to locate and extract video footage. Most DVRs use a proprietary filesystem. Sometimes this is in conjunction with a known filesystem, often Ext 2 or 3, but even in these cases the video data is typically located in a large proprietary partition which won’t be recognized by conventional computer forensic tools. However, if you take a closer look at these “unallocated” spaces, you may find some familiar structures and multitudes of highly compressed video data.

Hikvision-based systems store date/time metadata a little differently than other DVR filesystems, and when it comes to adding support for new DVRs into DVR Examiner, or recovering video manually for a laboratory case, understanding date/time information is critical.

In a previous blog post, we discussed why it is advantageous to utilize DD forensic images as opposed to E01 when analyzing hard drives from DVRs. In this post, we’ll look at another option – cloned hard drives. Cloned hard drives of the original DVR hard drive are often connected to the DVR in an … Continued