One of my developers came to me this morning and exclaimed: "Aaron, I hate Eclipse and I hate this project!" I was stunned by the blasphemous language and knew I needed to get more information in order to fully understand the situation. While making great progress on an important piece of code Eclipse completely crashed and he lost all his work. Restarting Eclipse brought his Workbench back but the template he was working on did not include his latest saves. He decided to take a break from the project and work on other tasks

As I explained to him, Eclipse has a built-in history manager that keeps track of all your saves. You determine how long to keep files on your system, the number of saves to track, and the maximum allowable file size for each individual history item. With these settings in place, retrieving previously saved versions of files is simply a matter of right-clicking the file, and selecting Compare With > Local History or Replace With > Local History. Regardless which you choose, Eclipse displays a list of each saved instance of the file including the date and time. You can select any version you want and compare that version to the current version on disk. If you choose Replace With - Local History, you can replace the current version with any previous version from the local history. The Local History is no replacement for source control management, but it's definitely useful in certain situations.

Now, relax, grab a coffee, and get back to work!