Question

is there a way to recover a password from local cache? The password has to be stored somewhere because I can run

svn co http://my.svn.server/foo

but I’ve lost the password it self. Do I have to reset it or is it possible (and how) to find and decrypt the password? I’m using mostly CLI SVN on windows, sometimes switching to TortoiseSVN or IntelliJ Idea SVN.

Answer 1

On Windows, Subversion stores the auth data in %APPDATA%\Subversion\auth. The passwords however are stored encrypted, not in plaintext.

You can decrypt those, but only if you log in to Windows as the same user for which the auth data was saved.

Someone even wrote a tool to decrypt those. Never tried the tool myself so I don’t know how well it works, but you might want to try it anyway:

http://www.leapbeyond.com/ric/TSvnPD/

Update: In TortoiseSVN 1.9 and later, you can do it without any additional tools:

Settings Dialog -> Saved Data, then click the “Clear...” button right of the text “Authentication Data“. A new dialog pops up, showing all stored authentication data where you can chose which one(s) to clear. Instead of clearing, hold down the Shift and Ctrl button, and then double click on the list. A new column is shown in the dialog which shows the password in clear.