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?
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 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.
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.
