Recovering a SVN Repository with out a dump file

Question

I have an old repository that I have no dump file for. I do have the complete repository, though, and am hoping that I can get it running on a new system.

I tried reading Recover svn from directory backup after server failure which gives me hope, but doesn't seem to have worked for me. Whenever I point TortoiseSVN or svnadmin at the repository folder to examine it, it reports "No such revision 1" despite there being 130 revs in the db folder.

Any advice you could offer would be greatly appreciated.

Tony

Answer 1

you can always create a dumpfile by using

svnadmin dump [PATH_TO_REPO] > newDump.dmp

However, I doubt you will succeed as the error message indicates that there is simply something wrong with your revisions.

Is there an file called "1" insinde the db/revs-dir?

Answer 2

This blog post mentions the error message, abide with a different revision number.

I noticed that the error claimed that revision 296 did not exist and indeed, when I opened the db/revs folder it only went up to 295. With a completely wild guess, I opened the /current file and noticed that it had the 296 revision number on it, so I assumed this is the pointer to the latest revision, but the data never made it to the server... I modified the number to 295 and everything immediately started working.

That's a bit of hack though.