Question

I know, that this topic is already well documented here. But I couldn’t find the right answer.

Some years ago our boss said to a colleague, that he have to put ALL into the SVN. He did it several times and in sum round about 7.2 Gigs. This is now completely outdated and it have to be removed from the SVN. Notice: All the revisions are in a one SVN directory tree and all documents in this directory tree should be deleted.

I already know that a revision can’t be removed, but 7.2Gigs are to much backupspace for an outdated business unit.

root: svn://192.168.123.123/
delete: svn://192.168.123.123/OUTDATED_DIR_TREE 
hold: svn://192.168.123.123/java
hold: svn://192.168.123.123/cpp

Is it possible to export the java and cpp path into a new installation (with new revisions if needed) and hold the comments and version tags?

svn, version 1.5.2 (r32768)
compiled Feb 25 2009, 16:12:21

Copyright (C) 2000-2008 CollabNet.
Subversion is open source software, see http://subversion.tigris.org/
This product includes software developed by CollabNet (http://www.Collab.Net/).

Answer 1

svndumpfilter should be what you need:

1. Export complete repo using svnadmin dump

2. Remove information from dump you do no longer need eg

   svndumpfilter –drop-empty-revs –renumber-revs exclude OUTDATED_DIR_TREE < dumpfile > filtereddump

3. Recreate repo using svnadmin load

Of course all users have to freshly checkout the complete repository.