On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 2:24 PM, Joachim Sauer <s...@gmx.net> wrote: > Hello, > > I'm currently reworking backups of multiple SVN repositories. In the > process I found out that one of those repositories has three broken > revisions. The problem is that the revision files in the revs > directory for those 3 revisions are of size 0 (those contain the > actual data of the revision, as far as I understand). This means that > I can't use svn dump (as it stops at that broken revision) and I can't > use svnsync. > > For the backup itself I can still use svn hotcopy (the previous way of > doing a backup), so this will be my workaround. > > I was able to find out the affected paths in the repository and > luckily the latest revision of those paths can be checked out without > a problem (so we "only" lost history, not current data). > > But a broken repository is not desirable and I should attempt to fix > it as much as possible. Losing the information of those three > revisions (and a few related ones, probably) would not be a major > problem, but the repository as a whole should be in a consistent state > (to allow svnadmin dump to work, for example). > > Is there a way to remove the broken revisions and still keep the rest > of the repository intact? Ideally without requiring everyone to make > new clean checkouts because the repository became incompatible. > > regards > Joachim Sauer > > P.S.: unfortunately there are no working backups of the broken > revisions, as the corruption seems to be pretty old (older than our > last full backup).
Since you know the affected paths, I think one possible way is to do an svnsync, while excluding the "corrupted paths" by way of path-based authz (i.e. make the affected paths unreadable by the svnsync user, using an authz file on the source repository). After that, re-import the "corrupted files" from one of your working copies. I think everyone will have to re-checkout though, because you'll have a new repository with slightly altered history. So it wouldn't be safe to give this new repository the same repos-uuid, and act like it's the same. If you search the mailinglist archives, you might find some more posts about this svnsync recovery trick (excluding broken files). -- Johan
