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To work seamlessly on different Windows 10 devices, I added an Eclipse workspace to OneDrive (OneDrive/Eclipse). The contents of this folder are my projects, and a .metadata (~45MB) folder, and a (hidden?) .recommenders (~5MB) folder.

Because all of this is inside OneDrive, all files and projects get synced between devices. If I come home from work, the projects will sync to my home computer, but so will the .metadata and .recommenders folders.

The problem is that OneDrive often runs into issues: something cannot be synced or overwritten, so it creates a local copy - which is obviously annoying. Upon closer inspections I realised I don't even know what .metadata and .recommenders are, or what they do.

  1. Should these folders be device specific and should hence not be syncronised between devices OR are they workspace specific and are they required to be in sync?
  2. What do these folders actually contain? When going through some files I see a lot of folders, plug-ins, and preferences but I don't get what they are for.
Bram Vanroy
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    In general, workspaces are not designed or intended to be shared, they're inherently local. The proper process is to share *projects*, preferably using a proper version control (SCM) system such as cvs, svn, git, etc). – E-Riz Nov 18 '15 at 16:29
  • I'd echo what E-Riz says (4 years later). I have projects which are deisgned to operate in both Windoze and Linux, for example. You have to be selective about which files to store in the repo, but other than that the process is easy, compared to the completely impossible issues you encounter if you try to dump Eclipse configuration stuff from one workspace into another on a different machine or OS. Plus, presumably you're going to have a shared, Cloud-based git repo anyway, right? – mike rodent Jan 12 '20 at 12:29

1 Answers1

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To what extend do you want it to be seamless? Including workspace settings or not?

  • .recommenders should contain information about dynamic ctrl-space completion based on the user's past behavior etc. Probably not needed for a seamless experience unless you care about details.
  • .metadata is all the workspace settings & cache & essentially the workspace's home directory. It contains all sorts of things: What is the .metadata folder in Eclipse workspace? Not super important to sync if you enable per project settings instead of workspace settings. But maybe needed for whatever your definition of seamless is. There is lots of caching and other things in there that isn't useful to sync and can cause odd effects so I would rather avoid the entire folder.
Community
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zapl
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    Can I delete .recommenders? And why does some project not have it? – powder366 Jul 07 '16 at 08:20
  • @powder366 I guess you can, but I would just rename it before you delete it so you can try it out. If you never used the advanced "Code Recommenders" (that's different from regular code completion) you probably also don't have that directory. – zapl Jul 07 '16 at 08:24