At some point in a developers life, we have to upgrade, switch hosting providers or replace broken hardware and with that comes the inevitable. Moving all of our apps, data and configuration settings, and eventually our holy repository.

Moving an SVN repository from one Subversion server to another, while carrying over the entire version history information may seem like a daunting task, but fortunately it’s rather quite easy and straight forward.

Backup your old Repository

Step one is the generate a dump file of the existing repository which we can later move to our new server.
We create this dump with the following command:

# svnadmin dump /path/to/old/repository > repository.svn_dump

This dump file contains now all the revisions that have ever been made and committed to our SVN repository, and therefore this file may get rather large, depending on how active and old the repository is. Read more »