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Re: Pruning out old revisions?

From: Ryan Schmidt <subversion-2008c_at_ryandesign.com>
Date: Thu, 2 Oct 2008 15:42:37 -0500

On Oct 2, 2008, at 2:08 PM, David Weintraub wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 2, 2008 at 2:31 PM, Gary Ansok wrote:
>> I'm working on a project where we have several very large and very
>> active
>> Subversion repositories.
>>
>> Disk space is becoming an issue, and we're trying to find a way to
>> remove
>> old revisions while still keeping more recent ones available.
>>
>> Is there a way to do this without dumping and rebuilding the
>> repository?
>> (Ideally, without changing the revision numbers.)
>>
>> Everything we've found so far indicates that we'll need the dump/
>> rebuild
>> cycle, but I thought I'd ask here whether there's something we've
>> missed.
>>
>> Generating a list of revisions to keep (all revisions less than M
>> days old
>> or one of the most recent N revisions) or to remove shouldn't be
>> an issue,
>> I'm sure, but it's the actual cleaning up that seems to be difficult.
>>
>> We're using Subversion 1.4.6, and there are few if any branches in
>> the
>> repositories.
>
> There's no EASY way to remove information in a Subversion repository.
>
> What you need to do is do a data dump, filter the results, and then
> reload the data into a new Subversion repository. Yes, it isn't fun.
>
> You need to be on the repository host and use the "svnadmin dump"
> command to dump the repository.
>
> Once you do that, you can use svndumpfilter command to filter out the
> unwanted revisions.
>
> Once you have a filtered dump file, you can use "svnadmin load" to
> reload your data into a new repository.
>
> See <http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.5/svn-
> book.html#svn.reposadmin.maint.tk.svndumpfilter>
> for more information.

And what you also need to realize is that since you use branches (and
maybe other cheap copies within your project), removing history may
make your repository larger instead of smaller, as all the cheap
copies of information you're deleting has to be converted into full
representations.

Basically, the answer to your question is don't. Get a larger hard
drive.

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Received on 2008-10-02 22:43:09 CEST

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