How can I dump all svn data while I lost some revisions in the repository?

Question

I want to dump my old svn source and load it to my new computer. My old svn repository is about 100GB huge.

• When I use svnadmin dump /xx/Repositoryfile > mydump to dump svn file, I got a 512Mb sized file. Finally, I found why:

• because the revision 302 has been lost. I can only get 1-301 revision's data.

• Even if use svnadmin dump /xx/Repositoryfile -r 303:90000--incremental > mydump to get the other source. It can't be loaded.

How can I move all my svn data to the new location?

Answer 1

If you have a backup of the repository when it's not in corrupted state (i.e. when it has those lost revisions) then you can repair the repository. I suggest following these steps to repair the repository:

1. At first, you should check whether there are corrupted revisions other than 302 in the original dump. You can check the particular revision range for consistency by using the following command line:

   svnadmin verify /xx/Repositoryfile -r 302:HEAD

2. If there are no corrupted revisions except 302, then you should dump all revisions that are valid.

   svnadmin dump /xx/Repositoryfile -r 0:300 > dump1.dmp

   svnadmin dump /xx/Repositoryfile -r 302:HEAD > dump2.dmp

3. Locate the repository backup that has the 301 revision NOT corrupted and dump only this revision:

   svnadmin dump /xx/Repositoryfile -r 301 > dump3.dmp

4. Create a clean repository (via the command svnadmin create <repo-name>) and load all these dumps one by one ((!)note that dump3.dmp must be loaded in second sequence).

   svnadmin load <repo-path> < dump1.dmp

   svnadmin load <repo-path> < dump3.dmp

   svnadmin load <repo-path> < dump2.dmp

This way you will recover the repository. If you have other corrupted revisions other than 301, you will have to perform more steps but the approach is still the same. I do hope it helps!