Recipe 1.14 Recovering from Total Disaster

1.14.1 Problem

Your installation of Eclipse has become hopelessly fouled up.

1.14.2 Solution

Just save any of the projects from the workspace directory that you want to retain, delete the decompressed files and directories, and unzip or untar the Eclipse download again. After replacing the saved projects in the workspace directory (omitting any suspect projects that might have caused the problem in the first place), you're set.

1.14.3 Discussion

One reason people like Eclipse is because they have control over the (re)installation process. This is in stark contrast to other IDEs, some of which are massive and do so many things behind the scenes that you can never trust them.

Note that you also can migrate projects from one version of Eclipse to another simply by copying project folders into the new version's workspace directory. This doesn't always work with major revisions of Eclipse, but with minor revisions, it works like a charm.

Eclipse doesn't install itself using the Windows installer, so there's no need to use the Windows control panel's Add/Remove Programs entry to manage Eclipse installation.