Backing up a Subversion repositoryEdit

Created 3/29/2007, updated 3/12/2020

Options

There are two main ways of backing up a live Subversion repository:

  1. Using svnadmin hotcopy
  2. Using svnadmin dump

In both cases you should run svnadmin as the owner of the repository. I chose to go with the second option for two reasons:

  1. I can pipe the dumpfile through bzip2 to compress it on the fly
  2. I can use the dumpfile with future versions of Subversion

Disk usage

  • Repository size on disk: 65MB
  • Backup size on disk: 78MB (note that this is actual two backups, "today's" and "yesterday's", because the backup script keeps a copy of the previous dump file; so the actual size per backup is really about 39MB).