Accidentally truncated crontab

[Bill Moran]

Daniela <dgw at liwest.at> wrote:

> Hi all!
> 
> I just emptied the system crontab, and don't know how I can recover it.
> I know that the contents are still somewhere on the drive, as I didn't write 
> anything on that partition.
> The size of the file must be stored somewhere in the inode, or maybe in the 
> directory, so I could just load the raw partition into my hexeditor and 
> change that field to the original length. But I thought I'd better not touch 
> it without consulting the experts first, because I don't have much experience 
> with file systems.
> In the ports I couldn't find an undelete utility, and the -w option to rm 
> doesn't work here.
> 
> Please help me, or at least tell me that there's nothing else I can do, so I 
> can use the method mentioned above.

Well ... there are some undelete utilities out there (I'm surprised there are
none in the ports) and I've seen a number of tutorials on how to recover
deleted files from UFS filesytems ... but I think you're _seriously_
overcomplicating things!

If you haven't customized the crontab, and you have sources installed, then
"cd /usr/src; mergemaster" will give you an opportunity to re-install the
default system crontab.  You could also download it directly from CVS.

If you did customize it and are foolish enough not to have backups, then
do some google searches on "undeleting from UFS" or something like that.
I've seen a few articles on how to do it in the past.  And start making
backups.  Putting your /etc directory under revision control is a decent
idea!

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com