SVN repo issues

Linux and Unix-Like UNIX and Linux Applications
1

We have about 5 different SVN repositories running on SVN 1.6.11 on top of CentOS Linux 6.3. I was asked to migrate our SVN server to a new server last week. We have a cron job that does a Full backup of each repo once a week, and every other night we do an incremental backup via

 svnadmin dump -r 100-200 --incremental repo |gzip -9 > incremental_100_200.svn.gz

(where repo is the name of the repo and 100 is the oldest revision since the last backup and 200 is the youngest revision at the time of this backup)

I did a full restore of the last full backup to the new server, creating an almost up to date copy of the repos. Throughout the week, I planned to restore the incremental backups from the old server to the new to keep them in sync and then switch to the new server on Friday.

Unfortunately, I must have missed an incremental restore on a few repos, and somehow not notice, and then we switched to the new server, and people continued to add files and make modifications, adding new revisions to the repo. The problem is, since there were some revisions missing on a few repos, now the new revisions have taken those revision numbers, so I cannot just get the incremental from the old repo and load it into the new repo since there is other data now occupying those revisions. What do I do?

2

When you say backup/restore, do you mean file copy or an SVN internal backup and restore that merges files?

Assuming yes, you should realize this is a moving traget, so take backups and load them in, then hook them up like a client to catch up on all missed updates. You might have to force an all-file check. When the all-file check is done, and a good occasion arrives or is made, take the old offline to all but the new, make it get updates from the new, and put the users on the new. You might have to monitor or block ports for client requests, to ensure everyone moves, unless you swap IPs or the like. As a backup, it is good to have the old get new updates only in the background until you are sure new is stable.