At this moment we are using Visual SVN and we are backing up the entire repositories directory for visual svn. This backs up the entire data for each repository inside our svn engine. I am curious if I will be able to restore those files in case of an emergency or a disaster? Any of you have experience with this restoration procedure? Thanks.
| ||||
|
feedback
|
|
See: http://www.visualsvn.com/support/topic/00012/ That points to the following documentation: It describes using the subversion commands to take the backup. I hope this is what you are doing already because taking a straight directory backup can result in having a non-usable repository. You should be able to use the backup from the subversion backup command to restore the full repository. However, as with any backup strategy, you must test the restoration yourself to be sure it works for you. | |||
|
feedback
|
|
The easiest and best way to make backups of a SVN repo is to use svnsync. Its an incremental tool that replays any commits to a backup repository. Its easy to get going - see this blog post - and its fast as it only sends changes. You will have to set up a post-rev-prop-change hook to catch the 'edge case' of when someone updates a historical revprop, but otherwise you can run it hourly (as I do) to keep backups continually. you can even run it in the post-commit hook if you're really paranoid about data backup! If your live repo dies, you can then just "svn relocate" to the backup repo until you have your live one running again (though, be careful if you write anything to the backup whilst the live is down unless you run svnsync to get those changes applied to the live repo, which is pretty obvious when you think about it). So you have continuous backups, and downtime measured in seconds using it with minimal resource usage. Backups don't get much better than that! | |||
|
feedback
|
|
Another option is hotcopy. It makes a back up of your entire repository. Takes up more disk space, but very easy to run and also very easy to restore repository using this. | |||
|
feedback
|
|
I'm doing it by: Also you can rar/zip it to save space. I was using the same method when I moved SVN from Linux to VisualSVN, so this backup works as it should. | ||||
|
feedback
|
|
VisualSVN is a Windows product so it'll be running on Windows. If the backup utility is able to use Volume Shadow Copy to make the backup, then that should produce an internally consistent backup. The built-in NTBACKUP or third party software such as Symantec Backup Exec, or the disk-based backup tools built into Windows Server 2008 are all capable of using Volume Shadow Copy. | |||||||
feedback
|
