How do I back up a remote SVN repository

create your local repository

svnadmin create /Users/jsmith/repo

create an empty pre-revprop-change hook script

echo '#!/bin/bash' > /Users/jsmith/repo/hooks/pre-revprop-change

make the pre-revprop-change hook script executable

chmod +x /Users/jsmith/backup/hooks/pre-revprop-change

initialize svnsync

svnsync init file:////Users/jsmith/repo https://www.smith.com/repo

synchronize repos

svnsync sync file:////Users/jsmith/repo

As of subversion 1.7, you can also use the new command svnrdump. From the docs:

Dump—that is, generate a repository dump stream of—revisions of the repository item located at SOURCE_URL, printing the information to standard output.

Usage would be:

svnrdump dump http://example.com/repos/ > repos.dump

This creates a "dump file" of the repository in repos.dump. This is a complete backup of your repository data including history, but is not directly readable by a subversion client. If you need to restore this data, use the standard svnadmin tools:

svnadmin create c:\backup-repos
svnadmin load c:\backup-repos < repos.dump

Haven't done any testing, but this might end up being slower than svnsync. svnrdump will do a complete dump of the repository everytime, where I'm assuming synsync will only import changes in the repository since the last time it was run. You will have a single file containing your entire repository though, which may or may not be easier to manage.

Note that you may want to pipe the output of svnrdump through gzip or similar program to possibly significantly reduce the size of the outputted file.

Just use the svnsync command.

First, create a fresh repository on your home machine.

svnadmin create c:\backuprepo

Or on Unix:

svnadmin create ./backuprepo

Next, create a file named pre-revprop-change.bat:

echo exit 0 > c:\backuprepo\hooks\pre-revprop-change.bat

Or on Unix:

echo -ne '#!/bin/sh\nexit 0' > ./backuprepo/hooks/pre-revprop-change
chmod ugo+x ./backuprepo/hooks/pre-revprop-change 

then, initialize the sync:

svnsync init file:///c:/backuprepo https://url/of/your/repository

Or on Unix:

svnsync init file:///Volumes/volumelabel/backuprepo https://url/of/your/repository

After that, you can simply run

svnsync sync file:///c:/backuprepo

once a day or so, and you'll get only those changes which are not yet in your backup repository. The first time it will take a while, but after you've synchronized your backup repository with the real one, it will only take a few seconds to sync it because only those revisions that are new need to be synched.