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Although you might be tempted to copy or move a live Subversion
repository using traditional Unix tools like cp, you really should use
the proper Subversion tools instead.
If you try to copy the repository (e.g. to do a backup), you might do so while someone else is performing a commit. If that happened, you would end up with a corrupted repository.
The correct way to copy or backup a Subversion repository is to use
the svnadmin dump and svnadmin load commands.
Performing a manual backup is pretty simple:
$ svnadmin dump -q /path/to/repo/dir | bzip2 -c > ~/repo.bz2
This will dump all revisions from the repository and place them into a compressed file.
If your Subversion repository is on server that you have SSH access to, this might be a faster way to get a local copy of the repository dump:
$ ssh example.com 'svnadmin dump -q /path/to/repo/dir | bzip2 -c' > repo.bz2
Once you have a repository dump, it's easy to load into a new and empty repository. You'll have to create and initialize a new Subversion repository, and then you can load your dump file into it.
$ mkdir repo $ svnadmin create repo $ bzcat repo.bz2 | svnadmin load -q repo
Of course, the best way to do backups is via an automated script that can be run by the cron daemon. I just so happen to have such a script.
More information about my backup Subversion script can be found here.
Peter Jones has been working in the software industry for over 15 years as a developer, manager, and an executive.
