Backing up large repositories

I have read issue 1819. I know the developers know about this problem.
    This message is to discuss possible workarounds.

My bdb respository has grown such that 'strings' is larger than 2GB. I
still wish to use svnadmin hotcopy but this is getting increasingly
difficult.

In svn 1.0.x the hotcopy code would successfully copy this large file
(after upgrading to the apr in apache 2.0.51), but fail to copy over the
file permissions (because stat fails). I was able to patch the code to
make that stat failure non-fatal, and things are okay.

In svn 1.1.x, the hotcopy code has changed drastically, such that it no
longer has a hard-coded list of files to copy, but uses readdir/stat to
(generically) clone an arbitrary directory structure. It can't be
patched to ignore stat failures and still work correctly.

My options I can think of are:

* build apr with largefile support

The little info I find on the mailing lists suggest this is not
recommended and there are reports, without any detail, that this could
be "dangerous."

* switch to fsfs

I'd like to wait a little longer for fsfs to mature before switching my
repository over. Wouldn't have this problem with fsfs though, until
someone checks in a >2GB file... *chuckle*

* write a custom hotcopy

This option is looking better and better, although it is disappointing
if this is my best option. Has anyone done this already?

* use svnadmin dump

Dump the repository instead of making a copy. Would work but doesn't
backup the whole repository (config, hooks).

Any other options? I'm sure other people are dealing with this problem
too. Anyone else like to share their experiences?

Thanks,

- Robert

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Received on Sat Oct 23 05:01:05 2004