TortoiseSVN: commit has been ignoring me?

Question

Hi,

I'm currently writing my master thesis and I'm using TortoiseSVN to keep a backup at freepository.com. I've been religiously committing several times a day, since I'm working hard and making many changes a day. Today I committed again and strangely enough I got an error saying that my working copy was out of date, which makes no sense considering that I'm the only one with access to that repository and I'm always working on the same computer on the same files -- so there's no way the version in the repository could be newer.

I created a local copy of my files, just in case (and boy I'm glad I did), and updated my local copy. Normally if you've made local changes you get a warning telling you you'll lose them, but in this case I didn't get any error. Rather, tortoise deleted several files and overwrote other files with very old versions (that is, my local files were newer, and they were overwritten with older versions). I checked the commit log and found that according to tortoise the last commit happened a week ago. As I've said I've been committing very frequently, and in fact I committed just yesterday evening. On every commit I got a "commit successful" message.

So... what has been happening here? Has tortoise just been ignoring me and not committing anything (even though it said it did)? Has anyone else had this problem before?

Thanks.

Answer 1

I am using SVN and TortoiseSVN since years, commits are atomic, if they didn't fail (no error message after commit) then you can safely assume it has been taken over on the server side. Otherwise nothing has been taken over.

One case that comes into my mind, where you can get trouble even when working alone is when you change the directory structure moving files. Then you might get tree conflicts for some reason I did not really understand quite well. In the resolved dialog you can check if it is the case. (If yes as you are the only committer, mark all as resolved, update and commit)

Supposition: Was the remote server in trouble and have put an old backup online again? Even in this case it should not "downgrade" your local files and keep your changes intact.

I hope this experienced problem (tree conflict) helps you.