Last night, I used exiftool to batch rename a collection of .mov files. Some of the files were renamed as required, but many of them were left without an extension.

I think the required EXIF tag that I used in the exiftool command was missing from some the files, resulting in ~140 .mov files renamed in a timestamp format without an extension.

Rather than manually appending .mov to each file, I searched Google for a script to automate the process. I adapted an example and executed it (*+0100 refers to common string at the end of all the target files):

$ for i in *+0100; do mv "$i" "`basename $i *+0100`.mov"; done

For some reason, ~140 files disappeared and I was left with a single file with a .mov extension. Not quite what I was expecting!

I searched the partition with photorec, but I haven't been able to recover the files. Is there any other way I may be able to recover them? These particular family videos were some of the few that I had not yet backed up.