Recovering lost IntelliJ IDEA shelved changesets

Imagine the following scenario:

• You are moving your beloved project out from a sub-directory of an svn repository, into it’s own brand spanking new repository.
• You have about 3 days worth of large refactoring to the codebase waiting in the wings, with most of the tests passing, but not quite ready for commit to the trunk
• You use IDEA’s shelve feature to put those changes into safe keeping, so you can make changes and commits to the repository in preparation for the move
• You manage to successfully migrate the svn repository across, managing to keep all the history (yay)
• You then open the new (and renamed) project in IDEA, and all of your shelved changes are gone

Gulp.

Luckily, IDEA never deletes any of the shelved changesets, and conveniently stores them in unified .diff format in $USERDIR$.IntelliJIdea80configshelf

Also, conveniently, there’s the ‘Version Control -> Apply Patch’ menu item, so you don’t have to worry about mucking about with the *nix patch command line tool.

Day saved. Hurrah!

** Perhaps this sort of thing is a good argument for using a Distributed VCS system, like git or mercurial or monotone et al. You would normally be doing lots of small commits to your local repository, without necessarily worrying about breaking trunk for everybody, and your changes stay safe