Ian Chilton

Here are some crude cron jobs I use to create nightly backups of svn repositories on the server (which will then get backed up elsewhere as part of the server backup).

The nightly backup will get overwritten each night, but a weekly backup is kept permanently.

When I say crude, they work fine for a quick job, but they are limited:

That said, here we go:

# At 01:05 each day, dump the repository to a file:
5 1 * * * svnadmin dump /home/svn/my_repository 2>/dev/null | gzip > ~/svn-backups/my_repository.svn.gz

# At 01:15 each Saturday, dump the repository out to a unique file:
15 1 * * 6 DATE=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d"); svnadmin dump /home/svn/my_repository 2>/dev/null | gzip > ~/svn-backups/week/my_repository-$DATE.svn.gz


Moving a Subversion (SVN) repository from one server to another (or backing and restoring up your Subversion server) and keeping all of the history and commits is actually very easy:

1) Dump the old repository: on your old svn server, run the following command to export out (and compress with gzip) your full repository (including all history and commits):

svnadmin dump /path/to/repository | gzip > dump_file_name.svn.gz

2) Copy the dump file to your new svn server:

scp dump_file_name.svn.gz user@newserver:

3) Create a new repository: on your new svn server, run the following command to create a new repository:

svnadmin create /path/to/repository

4) Import the dump file into the new repository:

zcat dump_file_name.svn | svnadmin load /path/to/repository

5) You then need to either re-create your working copies using “svn co” or you can use the switch command with –relocate:

svn sw --relocate \
https://oldsvn.domain.com/path/to/repository \
https://newsvn.domain.com/path/to/repository

Note that I broke the above command up over multiple lines for ease of reading but you can obviously ommit the \ if you put it all on a single line.

Another interesting thing you can do with the dump command is just dump a single commit. The following command will just dump out the commit with revision number 100:

svnadmin dump --incremental -r 100 /path/to/repository > dump_file_name.svn