Subversion Backups

In my previous post I wrote about making backups of subversion repositories. Only there is a problem. If you create a copy of the files in the repository directory, there is the possibility that the backup is incomplete or unusable. The solution is to create a dumpfile.

A dumpfile contains all the files in the repository. A dump file can be created with the command svnadmin dump /var/lib/svn > dumpfile. It uses svnadmin to create a dump file of the repository in /var/lib/svn and writes it to dumpfile.

I used a ruby program to create a dumpfile. The filename of the dumpfile that I created is based on the date and the revision: subversion-backup-<year>-<month>-<day>-r<revision>.dump. By using this filename, all files are sorted by date and contain the revision, which is also useful, when you have more than one revision a day (which you probable have).

• More information about subversion
• Daily backup on Windows
• Writing a Thesis and using Subversion