Recover files from old Subversion backup

Question

I have a tar backup from an old subversion server which has long since died. All the source code which had been managed by this server is legacy code which will never be needed again ... except this one project.

The tar file is full of little directories like "conf", "dav", "db"...

Is there any way of extracting the final source code of a single project from this backup?

Answer 1

Create a new subversion server. Restore the backup into the new server. Copy the code you need out into your current subversion server.

Answer 2

You only have to extract the repository directory as a whole from the tar archive:

tar xvf oldSubversionServer.tar path/to/subversion/repository

Then you can browse the repository or create a working copy of your project with a svn client, using the file: access method.

Answer 3

you could load the whole backup to the new server

tar xvf oldSubversionServer.tar | svnadmin load /var/svn/repos/temp

and then only dump that project

svnadmin dump /var/svn/repos/temp/project | gzip -9 > dump.gz

Load contents of a dump into the repository

gunzip -c dump.gz | svnadmin load /var/svn/repos/your_import_repo

this way you can keep you revisions for that project.