Is subversion safe to use?

[Gary Thomas <ga...@mlbassoc.com>]

I've been using this [slack] week to bring subversion into my workplace.
I'm quite a confident, longtime user of CVS and was feeling pretty good
about how svn fell into place.  Then I performed the "unspeakable"; I
touched the setup (I upgraded to a new version) and all of my work for
the week now seems to be untouchable.  Nothing I've tried has worked :-(

Before this happened, I made hot backups of my repositories (as well
as "normal" file system backups).  I can't access any of them either.

The loss is not so big - I can recreate what I've done since it was only
a few days work and I keep good records.  But what happens the next 
time? What if it's after weeks or months of using this tool and then I
find that everything is gone?

Am I just being paranoid?  What strategies can I utilize to minimize
the likelihood?

In the meantime, I'm rebuilding my repositories using FSFS (the main
reason I was upgrading anyway).  Hopefully that will be more stable.

n.b. if there's a way to recover my [old] work, I'm still game to try!

-- 
Gary Thomas <ga...@mlbassoc.com>
MLB Associates


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Re: Is subversion safe to use?

[Stephane Bortzmeyer <bo...@nic.fr>]

On Fri, Nov 26, 2004 at 05:16:14AM -0700,
 Gary Thomas <ga...@mlbassoc.com> wrote 
 a message of 30 lines which said:

> Before this happened, I made hot backups of my repositories (as well
> as "normal" file system backups).

Just a warning for the next time: when your important data are in a
binary format (wether the DBMS store or the LDAP backend or the
Subversion repository), you *MUST* backup in a text format as
well. Otherwise, as you discovered, any problem with the tools may
lead to a complete loss of data, even if your backups were OK.

For instance, in your crontab:

(mv  ~backup/databases-dumps/subversion  ~backup/databases-dumps/subversion.old ; svnadmin dump --quiet /home/Subversion-repository > ~backup/databases-dumps/subversion && gzip --best --force ~backup/databases-dumps/subversion.old)

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