Oh dear - big mistake - have deleted /var !

Yes, I know how stupid I have been but have learnt my lesson.

I am running OpenBSD 3.5 and have deleted the majority of /var.

Is there anyway a basic /var setup can be reconstructed or will I have to reinstall?

Any help or advice would be very welcome.

Regards,
David

Restore it from your backups...

No, seriously. It is very difficult to restore it without reinstall, since this directory depends very much on your custom installation. And i don't assume you remember its content to restore it perfectly. I don't think you could manage to restore it to the full functionality of your system. Even if you manage to restore a big part, your system will never be to your full satisfaction again, i believe.
Nontheless, you can try. Find some other system which could serve you with the desired files... don't know if that makes any sense.

One thing you could try is to recover the deleted files (unless you didn't write new stuff onto the disk).
http://home.fnal.gov/~muzaffar/undelete/README.html
http://www.data-recovery-software.n..._Download.shtml

Best thing would be if you don't boot your installed bsd, since at boot process log files are written to disk and therefore the deleted files would be overwritten and therefore couldn't be restored anymore. And don't do anything any more on your system that could overwrite the undeletable files. Boot from some boot or live linux cd.

Thanks all for your quick and helpful responses.

If reinstalling is the best then that's what I'll have to do. It's just hassle I could do without.

I'm running on Sparc64 platform and don't have a CD drive. I've only recently migrated from Linux so there wasn't too much on there. I have a backup of all the important stuff so it's not the end of the world.

There were some nice tweaks I had made but hopefully I can remember them.

Oh well, at least I've learnt my lesson re: "rm -rf" ...



Thanks again.

I would nonetheless give recovery / undeletion a try. Perhaps it works.

And about the lessons: the lessons you learn are always from things you regret...
Smart *** rules:
- never use root as everyday account
- never use rm -rf without being absolutely sure about what you're doing
- backup your system regularly
- don't be an idiot

OSX: welcome in club!
every serious *nix admin did at least 3-times this stupidity
a gratis tip, costs nothing and can save your work:
cd where-you-want
touch ./-dontsaythat
do you see?
now you really can enter: rm -rf *
rm (or better: the shell) will interprete 'rm -rf -dontsaythat *'
as options..... because not allowed, rm will abort
sure, this will also disturb other cmds, but reinstall is more disturbing.
i made the same mistake a couple of times, now it's called
'experiance' and for green adm i use the trick above

Thanks again all,

I've now reinstalled. I would like to have tried those data recovery tools but I don't have time at the moment

Anyway, I've decided to take some precautions and have added the following to my .bash_profile

alias rm='rm -i'



Thanks