Recover cron jobs accidently removed with crontab -r
crontab -r
removes the only file containing the cron jobs.
So if you did not make a backup, your only recovery options are:
- On RedHat/CentOS, if your jobs have been triggered before, you can find the cron log in
/var/log/cron
. The file will help you rewrite the jobs again. - Another option is to recover the file using a file recovery tool. This is less likely to be successful though, since the system partition is usually a busy one and corresponding sectors probably have already been overwritten.
- On Ubuntu/Debian, if your task has run before, try
grep CRON /var/log/syslog
If you have no /var/log/cron
file you can recover the commands (but not the timings) from the syslog
.
grep 'CRON.*(yourusername)' /var/log/syslog
you can then figure out most timings by looking at the datestamps.