Question

We’ve completely lost our repository and we have 8 developers with uncomitted changes. Restoring from backup is assumed to be not possible.

If one person could have access to all the working copies (either file copy or remote share) is it possible to merge changes in our working copies to one working copy? The final working copy could then be imported into a new repo.

In short, can you merge two different working copies without the server?

edit: please don’t poo poo me for not having backups; that part is beyond my control. It was assumed they were getting backed up nightly.

Followup: this is what we did:

1. Started with the most up to date working copy of all the developers.
2. Imported that into the new repo.
3. Working from newest working copy revision to oldest, copied in ONLY the files with changes then committed.
4. wash-rinse-repeat 6 times. (2 devs didn’t have uncomitted changes).
5. exported all the old working copies, zipped them up and stored them for safe keeping if needed.
6. Updated our revisions in the release management database to the now very young repo.

Answer 1

Since you lost your repository (sorry for that), you also lost the whole history.

All you can do now is start from scratch.

1. create a new repository
2. create the folder structure
3. export the working copy of the first user to a new folder
4. import the exported folder into the repository
5. all other users now check out a new working copy
6. all other users now ‘export’ their original working copy over the new working copy

by ‘export’, I mean creating a copy of the working copy, but without the hidden .svn folders in it.