How to fix "containing working copy admin area is missing" in SVN ?

Question

I deleted manually a directory I just added, offline, in my repository. I can't restore the directory.

Any attempt to do an update or a commit will fail with :

"blabla/.svn" containing working copy admin area is missing.

I understand why, but is there anyway to fix this.

I don't want to checkout the entire repo and add my changes to it manually, it would take hours.

Answer 1

Can you try to check out a new copy of the parent directory?

Edit: To be bit more specific, I meant to suggest going up one level and deleting the containing directory. Then do a

svn update --set-depth infinity

to replace the directory.

Answer 2

According to this: http://www.devcha.com/2008/03/svn-directory-svn-containing-working.html

Check-out the folder "blabla" to a different location and then copy its .svn folder back into the original "blabla".

Answer 3

fwiw, I had a similar situation and used svn --force delete _dir_. That solved the issue for me. Then i continued working with my working copy as normal.

Answer 4

I had this error recently, when the files were excluded by settings in my SVN globals. The error was especially nasty since I also deleted the files directly from the repository - and this meant that the above solutions were refusing wouldn't work. In this case, manually deleting the .svn directory from the directory that I removed from SVN allowed me to run an update which then allowed me to commit.

Answer 5

@Mark, this worked great, thank you!

To clarify, the error "Directory 'blah/.svn' containing working copy admin area is missing" occurred when I attempted to add the directory to the repository, but did not have enough filesystem privileges to do so. The directory was not already in the repository, but it was claiming to be under version control after the failed add.

Checking out a copy of the parent directory to another location, and replacing the .svn folder in the parent dir of the working copy allowed me to add and commit the new directory successfully (after fixing the file permissions, of course).

Answer 6

What I did to fix this was to delete the local copy of the folder under question and then do an svn update of the parent directly afterwards.

Fixed it right up.

Answer 7

I had the same problem, when I was trying to switch "C:\superfolder"

Error messages:

Directory 'C:\superfolder\subfolder\.svn'
containing
working copy admin area is missing
Please execute the 'Cleanup' command.

After trying to do a "cleanup", I got the following error:

 Cleanup failed to process the following paths:
 C:\superfolder\
'C:\superfolder\subfolder\' is not a working copy directory

Solution:

1. Delete the folder "subfolder"
2. Clean up the folder "superfolder"
3. Try to switch again the folder "superfolder"

this worked for me. Please let me know if it also works for you.

Answer 8

We use maven and svn. It was an mistaken checkin of target directory to SVN that cause this error. Removing that fixed everything, if this hint helps anyone.

Answer 9

I just did 'svn revert /blabla' and it worked, the folder is back and I can svn delete it