Is there a way to recover from an accidental “svn revert”?

Question

I managed to shoot myself in the foot this morning by doing the following:

1. Started working on a change to my project
2. Made a bunch of edits to a bunch

Answer 1

No, (absolutely) NO.

If you say to Subversion it should revert a file, all changes are gone by the wind.

Only your memory can get them back.

Exception: New files you had added, will only lose their status "added", but the file will remain in this directory, only status is unknown("?")

Platform / Software exception: Using TortoiseSVN on Windows, Revert first throws the files into Recycle Bin and then reverts them. You can dig into the Recycle Bin to recover the files.

Answer 2

Recently did this mistake of not committing new file changes (about 10) onto SVN and they all vanished because of my silly mistake. But what saved me was the windows "Restore previous versions" option in the context menu. Phew that was a relief and lesson learnt.

Answer 3

I reverted solution (Visual Studio + AnkhSVN ) and lose changes of few files. I can't find the file in the recycle bin.

BUT: I recovered my losing files with Handy Recovery, i.e. SVN just delete my files on reverting.

Use any data recovery software to recovery reverted files(like trial Handy Recovery)

Answer 4

Also if you have reverted your .NET code (.cs files etc) and you've built your application before revert but after you've made changes, you could recover changes from assembly file using any of the reflector tools to view code.

Answer 5

Not really Subversion specific, but if you're working with Eclipse, you can try your luck in the local history.

Now, something a little bit more Subversion specific: if you don't want to make a branch for every change you do, you can keep a couple of trunk checked out locally (trunk-modif-1, trunk-modif-2...). Each "modification" is done on a separate tree and you only need to keep a list of which check out correspond to which modification.

Or you could use Git locally but I never tried it.

Answer 6

I was extremely lucky to find a local change log of the file (Local Revisions) in the history browser in Eclipse. I had been inspecting the differences one by one and I had made a couple of saves on the file before overwriting.