An acquaintance complained about something not running on their system and asked for some help. I did a crontab -e and it mysteriously was blank! We were able to restore their crontab from a backup but she wants to find out what happened so they could take steps to avoid this happening in the future.
I checked history to see if someone accidentally ran a crontab -r and that wasnt the case. Someone mentioned that if someone was editing the crontab while the system is rebooting could also cause its disappearance. Checked too and that wasnt the case, the box has been up for 20 days.
Anyone have any ideas what could have caused crontab to just up and disappear?
It could be that the partition where /var is located was full.
If this is happening and /tmp is located in another partition you can edit the temporal file with crontab -e but when you finish the edition the new version can not be copied to /var/spool/cron/ and as result you obtain an empty file.
I know this is a strange case but crontab does not return any error on thi way.