Re: Taking mirror Backup of SVN Repos through 3rd Party Software

Daniel Shahaf <d.s_at_daniel.shahaf.name> wrote on 06/30/2011 07:35:36 AM:
> I'm going to say this even more clearly:
>
> If you backup a repository by copying its files while a server is
> running, the backup may be created corrupted.
>
> http://subversion.apache.org/docs/release-notes/1.7#single-db (sic)

This does not seem point to any additional warnings about the server
side yet (only the client)...

I realize regular backup software was never truly endorsed, but in
the past, the "corruption" could always be rolled back to the last
valid commit, since the server never modified files once they were
created. You could lose the last commit and need to manually
perform surgery on the "current" file, but the repo would still be
functional. Since backups are considered a snapshot in time this
isn't a big problem since it just moves the timeframe of the
backup to the previous commit.

To be honest, both hotcopy and svnsync are way too slow for
any server of appreciable size. If 1.7 is designed to modify
existing files in place on the server, potentially rendering
snapshot backups non repairable, it would be a huge regression.

Kevin R.
Received on 2011-06-30 16:07:05 CEST