[TSVN] huge (versioned) files causes tremendous disk activity - icon search?

I have a rather large database of email and newsgroups going back years - about
4.5 gigs worth.

I thought about backing it up by keeping it in Subversion; most files are mostly
text. About 1000 files; mostly small index files; about 50 large files of
10megs or more; 10 are 100-250megs, 1 is 760 megs.

Silly idea, but anyway, I tried it...

Copied everything to another directory (so I wouldn't be messing with live data)
and rolled 'em into a new repository. Took a while but went fine.

Then I created a temp directory and tried a checkout.

I'd forgotten the "base" copies kept in the .svn directories; that'd double
disk-usage on my notebook... But that's a separate issue. (hmmm... perhaps
a crc of each line or group of lines could be kept instead of a direct copy...
possible suggestion for Subversion...)

Naturally, I ran out of disk space on my test checkout, but that too is a
separate issue.

Here's the problem:

I used Windows explorer to see what files were in the checkout and what weren't.
However, whenever I selected that directory, disk usage went through the roof.
Using FileMon from SysInternals.com I could see that "explorer" was marching
through the files 512 bytes at a time. I'm guessing that someone was looking
for icons in the files, or something along those lines.
This went on for several minutes (roughly 800 files got checked out, about
2.5gigs; I didn't check which files 'cause it was too painful to wait minutes
for anything to happen... as soon as I could I deleted the directory...)

Since I don't get this activity on the same files when they're not versioned,
I'm presuming it's TortoiseSVN doing something.

Is there a way to change TSVN's behavior so it doesn't do whatever this is? Or
can the information be cached so it's only done once? Or...?

I *don't* have "show changed directories" checked, btw.

- Al -

-- 
--  Alan Weiner  --  alan_at_ajw.com  --  http://www.ajw.com
Palm OS Certified Developer
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