seek for your kidness

Dear all;
i would appreciate if you find me work around on this. i accidentally over wrote my crontab file "default one" and lost all the scheduled tasks that were existing before. let me explain what exactly i did:

1- i create my own file using vi and add a task for pinging our main server. the file path was under /home/username/mycronjobs/

2- i applied crontab /home/username/mycronjobs/filename

3- i realized that i lost all the cronjobs (that by default was installed under /var/spool/cron/crontabs) that was set by my colleague. it seems like i over wrote the old cronjobs.

please; help me on this as i need those cron jobs again on my system

thanks;

Look in /var/spool/cron and see if your old file was backed up. It would be in the format "filename ~" or "filename.bak" or similar.
If not then you may have to set it up again. That shouldn't be too difficult if you know which tasks were set.

Thanks Peteh for your fast response. It had to re-write 20 lines again.i appreciate the importance of backing up anything before making silly changes

If you want to edit cronjobs in the future, use "crontab -e" in a console - never edit the cron file directly.
Crontab -e opens the file specifically to edit. You can add any lines and save & quit or just quit if you don't want to save the changes.