How do I back up a SVN repository with rsnapshot, when the timestamps differ every time?

Question

I want to have rsnapshot backup a local on-disk SVN repository on a Linux machine. I know I can't just back it up off the file system, so before each snapshot I am making a copy with 'svnadmin hotcopy'. However, every time I do a hotcopy, the resulting files all have a current timestamp, rather than the same timestamp as the original file. This means I lose the ability to do the copy-on-write-esque disk space saving that rsnapshot gives.

One solution I have thought of is to have a script look at all the files in the hotcopy ($DEST) and for each file x, set the timestamp based on the file $SOURCE/x. I don't know if there is a way to make rsync do this on Linux (I know you can do it in Robocopy on Windows :) I'm sure it can be done with find and touch however.

Suggestions how to do this, or other solutions, welcomed. I'd rather not use incremental svn dumps, as I want each point-in-time snapshot to be a full copy of the repository at that time.

Answer 1

Turns out changing the timestamps on all the files wasn't that difficult:

cd /var/local/backup/svn
find . -exec touch -r /data/src/svn/\{\} \{\} \;

This will ensure that the timestamps on files that exist in the hot-copy backup have the same timestamp as their parent, meaning they should only be updated when you update the original.