Whether you’re upgrading because you’re using BETA versions that change rather frequently or upgrading to the next major release, you don’t want to lose all your hard work invested in configuring your setup. Here’s how I handle it and hopefully it’s useful to you. If you have other cool ways to persist workflows between upgrades, please share them.
Workspaces
I’ve created a workspaces folder in a custom directory on my HD where I store all the workspaces I like to use with Eclipse-based IDEs. I separate them by IDE and then by purpose. So for Flash Builder, my workspace hierarchy is like this:
/workspaces
/_fb4
/air
/as
/flash
/flex
This is where all of my IDE preferences and workbench layout settings are stored. Centralizing them here allows me greater flexibility when upgrading since I never have to worry about any changes to installation procedures overwriting my custom settings. Nevertheless, I backup my workspaces prior to upgrading and since their small text files it only takes a second to archive.
Documents Directory
On OSX, the Flash Builder installer creates an Adobe Flash Builder 4 directory in your Documents directory. The installation instructions advise you to uninstall any previous versions of Flash Builder before installing the new version. Following this advice will delete this folder if it already exists. So, be sure to back this up prior to uninstalling your current version. That way you can cherry pick anything you need after installing the new version.
Applications Directory
You should also backup up your program installation in your Applications directory for the same reasons as with the folder in your Documents directory. If you’ve heavily modified your install with additional plugins, etc., this is vital!
Plugin Restoration
Where are all my cool plugins? They got wiped during the upgrade process but if you followed my advice and backed everything up, you’ll be back up and running in a minute or two. There are generally (2) locations where plugin info is stored for Flash Builder. If you pull the data from your backups and place them in the following locations, you should have full access to all your plugins post-upgrade (provided they still work with the latest release)
#1 – /Documents/Adobe Flash Builder 4/.metadata/.plugins
#2 – /Applications/Adobe Flash Builder 4/plugins
Although this post is slanted more towards upgrading on OSX, it should be similar for other operating systems. Any issues, let me know…
Very useful thanks! Where are the ‘recent workspaces’ stored on osx. I thought I knew where they were at but maybe the .settings file has been moved?
For FB 4 the location is [install-dir]/configuration/.settings/org.eclipse.ui.ide.prefs
For FB 4.5 that location doesn’t exist anymore but there’s a preference page under Flash Builder > Preferences > General > Startup and Shutdown > Workspaces
[...] to Hasan Otuome for the OSX locations. Spread the Good [...]