Question

I was thinking about using an existing remotely connected svn repositories infrastructure as a method to also sync media folders.

By media I mean about 1Tb of video content.

Is there any disadvantage by doing it using SVN?

Is the transfer protocol efficient to transfer big files?

Is there an overhead in storage?

Thanks

Answer 1

As I said in my comment, SVN is about source-control.
It’s not a syncying tool, even if you may also use it for that purpose.

That said, SVN works well with binary files (like your media files).
Of course, you can’t get a diff on binary files, but it’s quite OK for the storage.

As the SVN manual states:

Note that whether or not a file is binary does not affect the amount
of repository space used to store changes to that file, nor does it
affect the amount of traffic between client and server. For storage
and transmission purposes, Subversion uses a diffing method that works
equally well on binary and text files; this is completely unrelated to
the diffing method used by the ‘svn diff’ command.

But remember that, if you only need syncing, you may have better options than SVN.
So try to take a look at other solutions, like rsync for instance, before deciding to use SVN.