How to clear the svn memory which still holds the deleted files?

Question

I have committed application setup files into SVN version by version. Now it accumulated large space. So I have deleted few of the setup files of earlier versions. But still I see that SVN is not cleared that memory.

So How can I clear that memory?

Answer 1

if you have delete a file wihtout telling svn (by using svn rm and then commit) you can delete the reference by calling svn del filename

Answer 2

svnadmin dump /path/to/repo | svndumpfilter exclude /path/to/file/one /path/to/file/two /path/to.... | svnadmin load /path/to/new-repo

Keep in mind that this may take a very long time for a large repository. I strongly recommend you take a backup first, and verify the result in /path/to/new-repo before deleting /path/to/repo and replacing it with /path/to/new-repo.

Also, if this actually helps you, you may be misunderstanding the concept or function of SVN, or you may be failing to plan the size of your disk / repository correctly.

I suspect this won't be overly helpful, but it does what you are asking.

Answer 3

Well, for all intents and purposes you may want to consider upping your storage space rather than deleting.

Another option would be to take a full repo snapshot where it is at a point where you probably will never revert, and delete the repository and create a new one, then dump the snapshot right back in and it will start at revision 1. I did this route for a couple projects, but only because we had a major file structure reorganization happen