Migrating Visual SVN Server from one Windows install to another

Question

I have Visual SVN Server on my Vista laptop. The repository resides on the second hard drive. I am doing a clean install of Windows 7 in the next few days. How do I configure or install Visual SVN Server again and keep the users, repositories, and settings intact from the previous installation? Thanks.

Answer 1

You can simply copy the folder containing the repositories (e.g. c:\repositories) to the new machine. That folder contains all the users (in the file htpasswd) and the access rights (authz).

Note: this is true if you're using subversion authentication. I'm not sure if it's the same when using windows authentication, but I guess it is, since there's also a file named (authz-windows).

Detailed instructions:

• on the new server, install VisualSVN server
• during the installation, you are asked where the repositories should be put (the default is c:\repositories)
• once the server is installed, go to the old machine and open the VisualSVN Server Manager
• right-click the VisualSVN Server (local) entry in the console and click Properties
• it the dialog you can find where the repositories are currently located
• copy everything contained in that folder to the new server's repository folder (e.g. c:\repositories)
• maybe you'll have to restart the server, but then everything should be up and running