[news.eclipse.newcomer] Re: Java projects disappearing

["Walter Harley" <eclipse@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

" sb" <simonbaker4@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message 
news:2868a5562be01f4de977b9c3594d4fad$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> One more experiment:
>
> Closed Eclipse.  Deleted all folders under bad "workspace" workspace 
> folder.  Copied all folders from "good" "workspace2" folder into 
> "workspace" folder.  Restarted Eclipse.  Everything is now visible in 
> "workspace" same as "workspace2".  So the problem must be in some data 
> within the workspace subdirectories at least, not global to the Eclipse 
> installation.
>
> I didn't keep a copy of the deleted bad workspace so can't do any more 
> analysis, but don't really have time.  I hope the Eclipse developers can 
> gives us some kind of a workspace repair or rebuild tool or more insight 
> into this problem so we don't have to clone our workspaces from scratch 
> periodically.

It is frustrating when things like that happen; I sympathize!

It is equally frustrating for the Eclipse developers to hear about bugs with 
no way to reproduce them.  There's really not much we can do to lend insight 
unless we can get the problem to happen, or at least get more detail about 
the conditions that cause it to happen.  The problem you encountered is 
apparently a rare occurrence: e.g., you said you found only one other 
mention from two years ago.  As a single data point, I have probably twenty 
or thirty Eclipse workspaces on several different machines, on various 
different operating systems, including some that I've been working in for 
years and others that I create and destroy weekly; I've never encountered 
the problem you're describing, nor have I heard of someone else encountering 
it till now.  Things that happen rarely are very hard to debug.

If it happens to you again, please save the workspace if at all possible, 
and post a Bugzilla bug, describing as thoroughly as possible your OS, JRE, 
version control system, third-party plugins if any, and so forth.  Only in 
that way can we make progress.

Again, I don't mean to diminish the significance of the problem - it's 
really frustrating when things like that happen, I know.  I fervently 
believe that our lives are hard enough without our tools being unreliable. 
But it doesn't seem like there's much we can do without more data, 
unfortunately :-(