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I have a 2 Debian subversion setups on separate servers, and the decision has been made to shut down one of the servers. But before I do so, I want to move all of the repositories on the one server to the other server (including all historic revisions, etc).

How is this done?

Can I simply copy the contents of /var/lib/svn/repo-name to /var/lib/svn/repo-name on the other server? Or is there more to it than that?

also do I need to do anything about permissions/ownership?

3 Answers 3

11

You should only copy the files across if the SVN environment is identical, if not:

  1. Use svnadmin on the machine you are migrating from to create a dump file:
    svnadmin dump myrepos > dumpfile
    
  2. Create new repositorys on your remaining server
  3. Load your dump files in:
    svnadmin load newrepos < dumpfile
  4. Copy any customizations and/or hook scripts across from the old server.
  5. If the URL has changed in the switch, switch any working copies with:
    svn switch --relocate http://new-server.lan/repos/repo .

This is all from the SVN Book.

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  • Excellent answer, thank you. Can you clarify what you mean in step 4?
    – Brent
    Jun 23, 2009 at 13:27
  • You can make configuration changes, and add "hook" scripts to subversion repositories to change behavirour and add additional functionality, these are not migrated with the svnadm dump command. I will clarify in my answer. Jun 23, 2009 at 14:47
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    Since you're changing the location of the server it should be svn switch --relocate old-server.lan/repos/repo new-server.lan/repos/repo (per svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.1/re27.html)
    – Tom Hennen
    Sep 28, 2010 at 16:56
  • Well spotted, I have updated my post. Sep 28, 2010 at 20:37
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You're best off doing a dump from the old repository and a load into the new. This is the cleanest, most "supported" way of migrating one repository to another. You can try copying the files, but if you're not moving to the same version of Subversion on the same processor architecture (yeah-- if you're using BerkeleyDB you can run into endian-ness issues... saw that on an Alpha to Intel SVN migration once) you could have problems.

Have a look at http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.1/ch05s03.html, under the section titled "Migrating a Repository".

(A friend of mine did this once over netcat between two boxes when we didn't have enough temporary space to hold a copy of the dump file! It worked, too...)

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There is more than one way to do it:

  1. Stop the svn server than just copy the contents of the directories.
  2. svnadmin dump PATH_TO_REPOS and than on target server #svnadmin load PATH_TO_MIRROR

    Note that svnadmin dump does not dump your repository configuration files and hook scripts.

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