Question

For my personal stuff I just use the svnadmin hotcopy command once a week but for more mission critical repositories that include many developers, is that enough? Or should I spend the time to put together a more rigorous backup strategy that includes full backups and incremental backups?

hotcopy seems like the easiest way to go, but I want to be able to restore a repo if, for some reason, it becomes corrupted. Will just doing a dump via hotcopy allow me to do this?

Answer 1

Are you worried about hotcopy or are you worried about backing up only once a week?

Hotcopy will produce a safe and complete backup of your repository, even if other processes (your developers, for example) access the repository at the same time. If you still don’t trust it, shut down all access to the repository and backup it by copying it off somewhere with the usual file system tools. (The developers are not going to work around the clock, are they?)

If you are worried about the once-a-week part: just think about what happens if the repo disappears on the day before the next backup is scheduled. Does it matter? If yes, make backups more often. It’s that simple.

Is your repository too big to keep several days or weeks worth of full backups? Implement a rotating backup scheme that uses full and incremental backups. Do you have plenty of space for backups? Save yourself the trouble and just make full backups.