Why does SVN take so much space?

Question

I am working on a large sized project that is about 1020 MB in size. This is because, apart from the code, we have other resources, like graphics, XML configurations, etc.

Answer 1

So that svn revert doesn't need to contact the server.

SVN actually stores another copy of the file locally. That's why the .svn dirs sum up to be almost as the project code base itself.