How to recover corrupted Eclipse workspace

Question

I just managed to corrupt contents of my Eclipse  metadata directory  Starting up with eclipse -clean did not work out  Deleting  metadata and then importing all projects  plugins and setting does not sound too interesting  I ended up moving  metadata  plugins org eclipse core resources  elsewhere and reimporting my projects only   Are there any tools or best practices to recover workspace

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I have succesfully recovered my existing workspace from a totally messed up situation  all kinds of core components giving NPE s and ClassCastExceptions and the like  by using this procedure    Open Eclipse Close error dialog Select first project in the workspace Right-click -  Refresh Close error dialog Close Eclipse Close error dialog Repeat for all projects in the workspace  if your projects are in CVS SVN etc  synchronize them  Clean and rebuild all projects Fixed   This whole procedure took me over half an hour for a big workspace  but it did fix it in the end

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When workspace is damaged and Eclipse cannot start  even using the -clean option  removing single file workspace  metadata  plugins org eclipse core resources  snap may help  source  comments to article https   web archive org web 20200517003712 https   letsgetdugg com 2009 04 19 recovering-a-corrupt-eclipse-workspace    Update  when Eclipse 4 X cannot start after crash  try to start with  -clearPersistedState option  if it didn t help then remove file workspace  metadata  plugins org eclipse e4 workbench workbench xmi  sources  https   www eclipse org forums index php m 1269045   https   www eclipse org forums index php t 522428  https   bugs eclipse org bugs show bug cgi id 404873   Note  you ll lose configuration of your perspective views tabs  Update  Subversive plugin may be responsible for inability to start Eclipse with corrupted metadata  If you have Subversive plugin installed  update it to latest build  at least 0 7 9 I20120210-1700  from update-site  Related bugs 372621 and 370374 were fixed by Subversive developers

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I know this sounds obvious  but if I m writing code for a living I would be sure to do a full backup weekly  with corresponding incremental backups daily   Simple and easy recovery    For a simple way to backup your eclipse directory and assuming your using Linux  you could use rsync   rsync -ar  lt eclipse-dir gt   lt backup-eclipse-dir gt   You can put this in cron and have it backup your files automatically   It will only copy over the changed files to your backup-eclipse-dir on subsequent runs

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In my case only removing org eclipse e4 workbench directory  under  metadata  plugins  and restarting Eclipse solved the problem

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You should be able to start your workspace after deleting the following file   metadata plugins org eclipse e4 workbench workbench xmi as shown here

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In my case  it was not the workspace that was broken but Eclipse itself  Even though it seemed like workspace is broken  the same error dialog  etc    all I had to do was reinstall Eclipse and point it to the old workspace  You can t really repair a broken workspace if it is the workspace that is broken but you can do so just for good measure  maybe it ll work

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None of the above worked for me  But what actually worked was deleting all   snap files from my workspace  This also preserves almost all settings including imported projects  Make sure to back up the workspace before trying it though

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Remove a file with  dat extension in  workspace  metadata  plugins org eclipse wst jsdt core  and then close eand open eclipse  maybe you cannot close eclipse  force it  with pkill -f eclipse if you are on linux or similar   This solution avoid to import all of existents projects

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I haven t been able to avoid rebuilding workspace occasionally  one or twice over several years of using eclipse    Delete the  metedata and rebuild

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I also experienced an issue like this  my workspace was corrupted and didn t do all the important things anymore   For some reason  I had a corrupt resource on one of my projects  It didn t show up in the package tree  but it did show in the error log in Eclipse as     Error while creating a link for external folder X  somefolder   After checking every project  because the error didn t point to one   I indeed found this resource in one of the build paths  in Configure Build Path menu it did show an error icon   and deleted it   See Eclipse  Kepler  Workspace acting weird  type hierarchy  searching for references not working  for a wider description of my issue if you re experiencing something similar   Posted this for future developers to reference

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If the workspace is not that big you could backup to say dropbox as a private locked folder

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I have some experience at recovering from eclipse when it becomes unstartable for whatever reason  could these blog entries help you   link  archived   also search for  cannot start eclipse   I am a new user  I can only post a single hyperlink  so I have to just ask that you search for the second    sorry   perhaps those allow you to recover your workspace as well  I hope it helps

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One more solution that I ve discovered by accident  and may help someone    Back up the corrupted workspace  Move half of you projects to some temporary location  Start Eclipse  if it works  go to step 5  Move the half of projects you ve removed back into the workspace  move out the other half  If you ve already done that  keep removing readding your projects in a binary search manner  Go to step 3  Exit Eclipse  move back all your projects  and start it again  You should see now that some of your projects are closed  and in the wrong working sets   Re-open your projects and move them to the correct working sets    In my case  it was a project that got corrupted  and not the entire workspace  attempting to import said project into a fresh workspace caused it to fail as well   So  I ve started to search for the faulty project - instead  I got the result described above

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deleting below file helped me solve my eclipse start up issue  Perforce plugin has always troubled me especially when my machine reboots  next time eclipse tries to recover workspace and craps out   workspace  metadata  plugins org eclipse core resources  snap  For your reference  Error I was getting  org eclipse core runtime CoreException  Plug-in com perforce team ui was unable to load class com perforce team ui UITeamProvider

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This thread may be a bit older  but since this still is a problem nowadays  I thought I   d propose a new solution for backing up Eclipse    At http   profiles yatta de you can download the Yatta Eclipse Launcher  You can use it to save your Eclipse and workspace setup  After installation  the Launcher will discover your existing Eclipse installations and workspaces  Click the Upload  amp  Share button  the blue one  on the right of the entry you want to back up     You won   t actually    share    your Eclipse or workspace with anyone  You   ll just upload a setup file with your metadata that only you have access to yourself   You could share this later  but you can also just use it as a backup    If you do that  you   ll be able to re-setup your IDE really fast if you ever have a fragged workspace or Eclipse installation

[eclipse] How to recover corrupted Eclipse workspace?

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