How do I fix a repository with one broken revision?

Question

My home server had a hard drive failure.

Once I realized the disk was going, I logged in and did a straight copy of my repository, which contains multiple projects.

Answer 1

I solved it.

The solution was (of course) obvious, once I realized it.

I had this:

• master/: A copy of a broken repository, featuring revision 0..947, with revision 823's files physically missing.
• repos/: A repository loaded from a backup (dump file), covering revision 0..910.

The solution was simply to dump from master/, from revision 911 and onwards. This was possible without any errors, which I take it means that none of the revisions in the range 911..947 directly depended on the state in revision 823, or something:

$ svnadmin dump --incremental -r 911:947 master/ > tail.txt
* Dumped revision 911.
* Dumped revision 912.
* Dumped revision 913.
[...]
* Dumped revision 947.

Anyway, then just apply the dump to the repository coming from the backup:

$ cat tail.txt | svnadmin load repos/
[lots of commits]

And now I have the full history restored, no problems:

$ svnadmin verify repos/
* Verified revision 0.
* Verified revision 1.
* Verified revision 2.
[...]
* Verified revision 945.
* Verified revision 946.
* Verified revision 947.

Yay!