svnadmin load

Name

svnadmin load — Read a repository dump stream from stdin.

Synopsis

svnadmin load REPOS_PATH [-r LOWER[:UPPER]]

Description

Read a repository dump stream from stdin, committing new revisions into the repository's filesystem. Progress feedback is sent to stdout. If no revisions are given, read and commit all revisions. But if --revision (-r) is provided, read and commit revisions LOWER revision through UPPER revision only. If only LOWER is given, load that one revision.

Prior to Subversion 1.8, svnadmin load was limited to reading all revisions that the dump stream contains, but now svnadmin load accepts --revision (-r) option that acts as a filter for dump stream revisions. This allows you to incrementally load only a range of revisions from a single dump stream making some repository maintenance and reorganization tasks much easier.

Examples

This shows the beginning of loading a repository from a backup file (made, of course, with svnadmin dump):

$ svnadmin load /var/svn/restored < repos-backup
<<< Started new txn, based on original revision 1
     * adding path : test ... done.
     * adding path : test/a ... done.
…

Or if you want to load into a subdirectory:

$ svnadmin load --parent-dir new/subdir/for/project \
                /var/svn/restored < repos-backup
<<< Started new txn, based on original revision 1
     * adding path : test ... done.
     * adding path : test/a ... done.
…

Newer versions of Subversion have grown more strict regarding the format of the values of Subversion's own built-in properties. Of course, properties created with older versions of Subversion wouldn't have benefitted from that strictness, and as such might be improperly formatted. Dump streams carry property values as-is, so using Subversion 1.8 to load dump streams created from repositories with ill-formatted property values will, by default, trigger a validation error. There are several workaround for this problem. First, you can manually repair the problematic property values in the source repository and recreate the dump stream. Or, you can manually tweak the dump stream itself to fix those property values. Finally, if you'd rather not deal with the problem right now, use the --bypass-prop-validation option with svnadmin load.