Synopsis

svnadmin dump REPOS_PATH [-r LOWER[:UPPER]] [--incremental]

Description

Dump the contents of filesystem to stdout in a “dumpfile” portable format, sending feedback to stderr. Dump revisions LOWER rev through UPPER rev. If no revisions are given, dump all revision trees. If only LOWER is given, dump that one revision tree. See the section called “Migrating Repository Data Elsewhere” for a practical use.

By default, the Subversion dumpfile stream contains a single revision (the first revision in the requested revision range) in which every file and directory in the repository in that revision is presented as if that whole tree was added at once, followed by other revisions (the remainder of the revisions in the requested range) which contain only the files and directories which were modified in those revisions. For a modified file, the complete fulltext representation of its contents, as well as all of its properties, are presented in the dumpfile; for a directory, all of its properties are presented.

There are two useful options which modify the dumpfile generator's behavior. The first is the --incremental option, which simply causes that first revision in the dumpfile stream to contain only the files and directories modified in that revision, instead of being presented as the addition of a new tree, and in exactly the same way that every other revision in the dumpfile is presented. This is useful for generating a relatively small dumpfile to be loaded into another repository which already has the files and directories that exist in the original repository.

The second useful option is --deltas. This option causes svnadmin dump to, instead of emitting fulltext representations of file contents and property lists, emit only deltas of those items against their previous versions. This reduces (in some cases, drastically) the size of the dumpfile that svnadmin dump creates. There are, however, disadvantages to using this option—deltified dumpfiles are more CPU intensive to create, cannot be operated on by svndumpfilter, and tend not to compress as well as their non-deltified counterparts when using third-party tools like gzip and bzip2.

Options

--revision (-r) REV
--incremental
--quiet (-q)
--deltas

Examples

Dump your whole repository:

$ svnadmin dump /usr/local/svn/repos
SVN-fs-dump-format-version: 1
Revision-number: 0
* Dumped revision 0.
Prop-content-length: 56
Content-length: 56
…

Incrementally dump a single transaction from your repository:

$ svnadmin dump /usr/local/svn/repos -r 21 --incremental 
* Dumped revision 21.
SVN-fs-dump-format-version: 1
Revision-number: 21
Prop-content-length: 101
Content-length: 101
…