Can you recover ~/.ssh contents on AWS EC2 with an open session and keys?

Question

I am using AWS EC2 with Ubuntu. I accidentally deleted the contents of ~/.ssh but still have my session open and still have my .pem and public keys backed up on my PC. Is there a way to recover my ~/.ssh content? I tried copying my public key, pasting it into a file with the same name on my instance and entering.

cat my-key.pkk >> authorized_keys 

But I cannot open another session with PuTTY.

Answer 1

You cannot recover it.

But as long as you have your session open, you can re-create the authorized_keys the same way, you would create it for the very first time on a normal *nix system.

• create ~/.ssh folder, and set its permissions to 700:

  mkdir ~/.ssh
  chmod 700 ~/.ssh 
  

• run PuTTYgen on your local Windows machine, load your key pair (.pem or .ppk) into it, copy the contents of Public key for pasting into OpenSSH authorized_keys file box to the clipboard;

• type cat > ~/.ssh/authorized_keys in your PuTTY terminal;
• right click the terminal window to paste the line copied from PuTTYgen;
• press Enter and Ctrl+C;

• set permissions of ~/.ssh/authorized_keys to 600:

  chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
  

Now you should be able to authenticate a new session using your private key.

See also my guide for Set up SSH public key authentication.