Differences Between svnadmin hotcopy, svnadmin dump, and hotbackup.py?

[Alex Valys <av...@MIT.EDU>]

Hi all,
What's the best way to generate a full backup (for archival/recovery 
purposes) of a Subversion repository?  It seems to me that there are 
three tools/commands that will do the job, but I've had trouble finding 
details on the specifics of each:

- svnadmin hotcopy - safely copies the entire repository directory to 
another location.
- hotbackup.py - does the same thing as svnadmin hotcopy, as near as I 
can tell.
- svnadmin dump - creates a text file dump of the entire contents of 
the repository, which can be imported into an empty repository to 
restore it.

So, a few questions:
1) What are the differences between svnadmin hotcopy and hotbackup.py?
2) If I want to be assured that my backups can safely be restored on 
platforms other than the one they were created on, should I stick with 
svnadmin dump?  This in particular is very important - if my SVN server 
(Linux-x86-based) fails, I'd like to be able to get another one up and 
running on another platform (an Apple XServe, for example) as easily as 
possible.
3) Are there any disadvantages to using svnadmin dump, as opposed to 
one of the other methods?

Any information/advice would be appreciated,
Alex Valys


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Re: Differences Between svnadmin hotcopy, svnadmin dump, and hotbackup.py?

[Ed Swierk <es...@cs.stanford.edu>]

On Tue, 19 Oct 2004, Alex Valys wrote:

> 1) What are the differences between svnadmin hotcopy and hotbackup.py?

hotbackup.py is simply a wrapper around svnadmin hotcopy.  It does useful 
things like creating a new directory for the backup, and deleting old 
backups.  Therefore it can be called directly from a cron job.

--Ed

-- 
Ed Swierk
eswierk@cs.stanford.edu

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