What are .recommenders and .metadata in the Eclipse workspace and should they be synchronized between devices?

Question

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

Since all this is inside OneDrive, all files and projects are synchronized between devices. If I get back from work, projects will sync to my home computer, but will also have .metadata and .recommenders folders.

The problem is that OneDrive often runs into problems: something cannot be synchronized or overwritten, so a local copy is created, which is clearly annoying. During the next checks, I realized that I don’t even know what metadata and reviewers are, or what they do.

• If these folders are device-specific and should not be synchronized between devices OR are they specific workspaces and are they mandatory for synchronization?
• What do these folders really contain? When viewing some files, I see a lot of folders, plugins and preferences, but I don’t understand what they are for.

Answer 1

To what extent do you want it to be seamless? Enable workspace settings or not?

• .recommenders should contain ctrl-space dynamic completion information based on user behavior in the past, etc. Perhaps this is not required for smooth passage if you do not care about the details.
• .metadata is all workspace settings and cache, and essentially the workspace home directory. It contains all kinds of things: What is the .metadata folder in the Eclipse workspace? It is not very important to synchronize if you enable settings for each project instead of workspace settings. But perhaps this is necessary for any of your definitions seamless. There are many caches and other things that are not useful for synchronization and that can cause odd effects, so I would prefer to avoid the entire folder.