Subversion Path on Ubuntu Server

Question

Might be a dumb question. But I installed SVN 1.4.6 via apt-get. Everythings working dandy with no issues. I want to backup all the SVN files so I figured to backup /svn which is where appache is setup to look for.

Anyhow. I have a file called retroeventhandler.vbs. When I run

sudo find / -name retroeventhandler.vbs

I get nothing back. But I can browse the server at ip/svn/ and see all the files there.

Any ideas where these files should be? Am I missing something.

UPDATE based on squillman's post:

ls -l /svn/repos/avqbsync/db/revs returns

total 35252
-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data root         115 2009-09-01 14:42 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data root     9445835 2009-09-01 14:42 1
-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data root        2490 2009-09-01 14:42 2
-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data root         800 2009-09-01 14:42 3
-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data    4779 2009-09-08 14:06 4
-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 8914223 2009-09-08 14:45 5
-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 8816246 2009-09-08 16:28 6
-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data     651 2009-09-08 16:30 7
-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data     862 2009-09-08 16:31 8
-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 8818276 2009-09-08 16:35 9

My understanding is that each of these are revs or versions. So if I backup this directory I presume I would later be able to restore the files? Or no. Sorry if this is a noob question, just a bit confusing.

Another Update: Found this link which might give me a better solution:

Answer 1

Subversion stores repository information inside a database of flat files. If your repository lives in /svn, then that's where your committed files are. It doesn't actually store the repository data in the same filestructure as you create on the client-side. You won't actually see retroeventhandler.vbs at the filesystem level.

If you want to browse the repository use a subversion client (such as TortoiseSVN in Windows) or svnlook.

In response to your edit:
Have a look at this article, toward the bottom it talks about backing up a repo using svnadmin dump.

Answer 2

You should probably be using svnadmin dump to do your backups. I would strongly recommend reading through the svn book

Answer 3

squillman is correct. You won't find the files just sitting there, they are contained within the database. Here is a great perl script that performs a backup, copies it to another machine, tests the integrity of the backup, and emails you with the results.

Answer 4

I just finished a shell script that does monthly full backups and nightly incrementals, all to an offsite server. This is how it works:

The offsite server runs a nightly cron job. On the first Sunday of every month, this script runs ssh svnuser@myhost svnadmin dump /svnpath and pipes the output to a file. It then scans backwards from the end of the file and records the last revision number in a file.

On all other nights, the script runs, via ssh, 'svnlook youngest /svnpath' and compares the output to the last recorded (backed up) revision number. If there have been new commits, it runs svnadmin dump -q --deltas --incremental -r $LASTREV+1:HEAD /svnroot and dumps the output to a file.

Then it runs some cleanup code to delete full dumps older than $N days and any incremental dumps older than the newest full.