Hi, I want to delete a svn branch to make sure people (and I!) don't work on a archived branch by mistake (we have already merged the branch into the trunk).
However I don't want to loose the branch's history and would idealy still want to be able to see the branch in tortoise svn's graph.
Can I have the best of both world (cleaned up branch's and history?)
-thanks for the help Alex.
Even if you delete the branch, the history never disappears. You can probably tell TortoiseSVN's graph function to show you the repository as it existed at a particular revision in the past; this would allow you to see the old history if you really need to.
In the repo-browser, you can look at the log for the 'branches' directory to see in which revision the branch was deleted. You can then use the revision selector in the repo browser (button in the top right, almost certainly says 'HEAD') to look at the previous revision, which will contain the branch as it was just before it was deleted.
From here, you can do what you need to do -- look at the branch in the browser, copy bits elsewhere or even check it out.