Recover Cron Jobs – How to Restore After Crontab -r

cronlinux

I entered crontab -r instead of crontab -e and all my cron jobs have been removed.

What is the best way (or is there one) to recover those jobs?

Best Answer

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
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