Question

Me and two other guys recently started our own web development company. We each work from our homes and have decided we want to keep one central location for all of our files. These files include word documents, spreadsheets, client files, designs.. etc. Anything pertaining to our company. I have a pretty solid internet connection and a windows 2008 server box sitting at home so I set up a subversion repository.

Our file repository will look something like this.

Clients
   Company A
       Design (photoshop files, wireframes, concepts)
       Documents ( logins, quotes, proposals etc)
       Site Backups
   Company B
       Design 
       Documents 
       Site Backups
Prospects
   Company C
   Company D
Our Company
   Our Website
   Documents (contract, operating procudres)

My question is in regards to design files. The photoshop files that my designer works with range in sizes from 10mb to 100mb. I don’t think we need to keep these files version-ed as this would eat up space incredibly fast. How do I go about controlling which files get version-ed, and which files are just stored. What I am thinking is that all documents need to be version-ed, and any files other then that should not be.

Any help would be appreciated, thanks!

Edit
I am also curious whether this is the way to go. I just like this system since it keeps version of all my documents and at the same time. Also essentially I will have 3 backups in 3 different locations (3 local copies) so no need for backing it up. I am unsure of how svn would perform as purely a huge file repository.

Answer 1

Use the svn:ignore property. Here’s a quote explaining it:

The svn:ignore property contains a
list of file patterns which certain
Subversion operations will ignore.
Perhaps the most commonly used special
property, it works in conjunction with
the global-ignores run-time
configuration option (see the section
called “Config”) to filter unversioned
files and directories out of commands
svn status, svn add, and svn import.

The rationale behind the svn:ignore
property is easily explained.
Subversion does not assume that every
file or subdirectory in a working copy
directory is intended for version
control. Resources must be explicitly
placed under Subversion’s management
using the svn add or svn import
commands. As a result, there are often
many resources in a working copy that
are not versioned.

It’s taken from the “Subversion book”, the section on properties.

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Note that the svn:ignore property can be set by filename wildcards (i.e. *.exe). You can add programmatic scripting (using hooks or SVN bindings for a programming language) to specify other rules – i.e. all files above 100MB are ignored. However, this may be somewhat dangerous. The choice is yours.