How to recover corrupted Eclipse workspace?

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?

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.

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

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.

I haven't been able to avoid rebuilding workspace occasionally (one or twice over several years of using eclipse). Delete the .metedata and rebuild.

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.

One more solution that I've discovered by accident, and may help someone:

1. Back up the corrupted workspace.
2. Move half of you projects to some temporary location.
3. Start Eclipse, if it works, go to step 5.
4. 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.
5. 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.

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 & 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.

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

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 <eclipse-dir> <backup-eclipse-dir>

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.

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.

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!!!

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.

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 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20681540/eclipse-kepler-workspace-acting-weird-type-hierarchy-searching-for-reference for a wider description of my issue if you're experiencing something similar.

Posted this for future developers to reference.

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.

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