What's the best way to clean up a Subversion repository?

Question

I have a growing repository containing a dozen or so projects that I maintain using TortoiseSVN (as I am completely new to this and don't know the ins and outs yet). The space I have to hold the repository is limited so I want to back it up, then remove some of the older versions. For example, if a project is at version 50, I want to keep only 50,49,48.

Answer 1

There's no way to "snip" a repository at a particular revision in the manner you describe. What you could do is svn export the whole repository at the desired revision, then import it into a new repository, then replay the commits from the revisions after that from your log file into the new repository. This is not trivial.

Alternatively, if you just want to exclude some cluttered paths from your repository, and you have direct access to the file system where the repository is residing, you can use a combination of svnadmin and svndumpfilter to select the paths you want and prune all others.

Note that what you're describing is more or less against the point of Subversion: it's supposed to keep everything. If you frequently have trouble with this, consider establishing better checkin practices. Or consider using Git, which makes this sort of experimentation virtually free.

Answer 2

Removing old revisions kind of defeats the point of version control, but you can just dump out the revisions you want to keep, then put them into a new repo, and delete the old one.

svnadmin dump /path/to/current/repo -r48:50 > svn.dump
svnadmin create /path/to/new/repo
svnadmin load /path/to/new/repo < svn.dump

Or use svndumpfilter to include/exclude the particular bits you want, etc. There also some info in the svn FAQs about removal that you may find useful.