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dump vs. hotcopy

From: Dirk Schenkewitz <schenkewitz_at_docomolab-euro.com>
Date: 2005-06-21 17:59:01 CEST

Hi,
I just tried something (SVN-1.2.0, FSFS)

---------------------------------
# svnadmin hotcopy AN AN.backup
# svnadmin dump AN.backup > AN.backup.dump
# tar -cvf AN.backup.tar AN.backup
# bzip2 -k AN.backup.dump AN.backup.tar
# ll
...
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 1024 Jun 21 10:52 AN.backup
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4941453 Jun 21 11:49 AN.backup.dump
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 891698 Jun 21 11:49 AN.backup.dump.bz2
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1669120 Jun 21 11:49 AN.backup.tar
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 840067 Jun 21 11:49 AN.backup.tar.bz2
...
# du -sb AN.backup
1558671 AN.backup
----------------------------------

I'm astonished that the dump is about 3 times the size of the tar-file.

And from what Ulrich Eckhardt wrote:

> 1. Use the hotcopy script to make a duplicate of your repository.
> 2. 'svnadmin dump' the copy and backup that data - it's the repository's
> content.
> 3. If you're really paranoid, backup the configuration data from (the copy of)
> your repository. Which configuration data you have depends on your access
> method, but the contents of the 'conf' subdir are a candidate. You should
> know which those are, you modified them by hand when setting up the
> repository.

I get the impression that 'svnadmin hotcopy' is safer that 'svnadmin dump'
and more complete. For pure backups, it seems to be the better solution.
E.g., do an 'svnadmin hotcopy REPO REPO.bak' from a post_commit-hook if
REPO.bak does not exist, then make a compressed tarfile from REPO.bak and
delete REPO.bak.
Maybe keep the last 5 tar-files and delete the older ones. Maybe send the
tar-files via scp or rsync to some other machine and/or burn them to CD/DVD
if you are paranoid enough (like me).

Ok, this can be done only for repositories that are not too big. For very
big repositories it might be better to create incremental dumps, but the
disadvantage is that you need to keep all of them to be able to fully
restore a repository, and they seem to take a little more space than one
dump of the whole repository.

Are there any special advantages of "dump" compared to "hotcopy", other than
the ability to make incremental dumps?

Best regards
   Dirk

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Received on Tue Jun 21 18:00:51 2005

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