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You probably got here because you Googled.  I did 😉

As an eclipse user, occasionally you get greeted with error messages which are tricky to resolve.  The error, “Resource ‘X’ is out of sync with file system” made me scratch my head for a little while – as far as I could tell, it wasn’t!

Screenshot of error dialog
As an eclipse user, sooner or later you’ll see this.

There can be a few causes of this:

  • If you edit any workspace file from outside of eclipse, which is part of your project, this can throw the error.
  • The same is true of directories – have you renamed/moved/deleted anything?
  • The cause which threw my error was symbolic links.  Because I had changed the name of a target directory, this was enough to trigger this error dialog, even though the file name of the symlink itself was unchanged!

To prevent this dialog appearing, as far as possible, visit Window > Preferences > General > Workspace and select:

  • Refresh using native hooks or polling
  • Refresh on access
Image of eclipse preferences window
Selecting appropriate preferences can keep your workspace up to date and reduce the chance of errors appearing.

The combination of ensuring tight controls on renaming files and directories, together with automating detection of this as much as possible, will lead to a smoother experience with this great integrated development environment.

Have your say!