What do I lose if I skip the .metadata/ directory when doing the back-up of my eclipse workspace? (is there some documentation describing what eclipse stores in this directory)? I've noticed that it changes very often (essentially every time that I use eclipse (galileo).

I've seen this question, but I'm not interested in doing a back-up of plug-ins and settings (also because I'm not sure that they would work properly when restored after a re-installation of my PC or on a new PC). I'm just interested in doing a back-up of my projects (source code, libraries, possible data, .svn and .git directories). So, can I safely ignore the .metadata/ directory?