How to migrate SVN repository

Last updated on June 13, 2020 by Dan Nanni

Subversion (SVN) is a version control system, maintaining versions for files and directories. SVN uses FSFS (Fast Secure File System) as the backend storage to store revision histories.

If you would like to migrate the current subversion repository on one server onto another server, without losing all revision history, you can use svnadmin's dump command, which dumps the contents of FSFS to stdout. Then you can use svnadmin's load command to load the saved dump file into a new SVN repository. Follow these steps to migrate SVN repository to a new server.

On an old SVN server, create an SVN dump of the existing SVN repository.

$ sudo svnadmin dump /path/to-your/repo > svn.dump

The above command will dump all existing SVN history to a dump file. If you instead would like to migrate specific SVN revisions (e.g., from revision 1000 to 2000), you can generate SVN dump as follows.

$ sudo svnadmin dump /path/to-your/repo -r 1000:2000 > svn.dump

Now transfer the created svn.dump to a new server.

On the new SVN server, restore the SVN dump.

$ sudo svnadmin create /svnrepos
$ sudo svnadmin load /svnrepos < svn.dump

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