If I back up my svn repository, is that a sufficient backup of all the code/data in it?

Question

I'm new to svn, having recently installed Tortoise svn on my Windows laptop. I'm using it in a single user capacity to keep track programming code/projects, web pages, xml, xslt, as well as a plethora of textual material I've created (novels, writings and such like).

I was thinking that if everything is checked in it seems sufficient to simply backup the repository and not have to back up the files it holds. It seems a reasonable idea but I thought there might be a "gotcha" or two in that premise.

Is there anything I should be aware of here, or am I good to go?

Answer 1

You can go for svnadmin dump.

To take the dump you can use the following command. This dump will contain all the details about your repository, viz revisions, checkin details, author, time, physical files etc. So you can restore it to another repository at any time without lose of any data that you have in the current repository.

svnadmin dump /my/repo/path/repo1 > full.dump

Answer 2

As far as I understand, you created the repository via TortoiseSVN and access it locally on filesystem (i.e. via file:// scheme in the URL), you are the only one who is going to access the repository.

In such case it still makes sense to backup the repository to an external storage from time to time. It will assure that you won't lose your versioned data in case of local storage corruption / disaster / whaterverhappens.

As the backup method, I can suggest to use svnadmin hotcopy or you can copy the repository directory using built-in OS tools (e.g. via Windows Explorer or FAR). If you copy the repository using Windows Explorer, make sure that the repository is not accessed by anyone at this time.

If you use Windows Backup (Volume Shadow Copy backup) on your machine, then you can easily configure it to backup the repository on schedule.