Can a file be recovered after svn delete?

Question

I am trying to figure out if we need to reduce the number of developers having svn admin rights.

1 - If a subversion user accidentally deletes and commits the delete of a file or folder, how can the file be recovered?

2 - If the subversion user has svn admin rights, does svn delete executed on the client behave differently (more permanent)?

Target: svn command line client under Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.2

Thanks in advance,

Answer 1

• 1 - Everything can be undone using SVN. Even a rm (or delete) command can be undone.
• 2 - #1 applies for every users

Answer 2

Yes, the deleted data can be recovered. Simply determine which revision removed the information, and "reverse-merge" the commit. Something like this:

svn merge -c -12345 working_copy_path
svn commit working_copy_path

The -12345 means "reverse-merge revision 12345".

Note that subversion itself doesn't have any concept of "administrative" users. Users either have or do not have read and/or write permissions to any given path in the repository. Also note that depending on how you access the repository, there may effectively be no authorization at all.

Answer 3

Just checkout a revision where the file still existed:

svn checkout -r <revision> <path to repository>

Now you can add the file again.

Answer 4

A thorough discussion on reverting deletion from the "Version Control with Subversion" book can be found here:

http://svnbook.red-bean.com/nightly/en/svn.branchmerge.basicmerging.html#svn.branchmerge.basicmerging.resurrect