Waht could be the reason for “svnrdump” and “svnadmin dump” to produce different sized dumps?

2
votes

I tried to migrate multiple repositories to a different SVN server. I have root access to the source server, so I first tried to dump the repositories locally on the server using "svnadmin dump". This works fine for the first couple of repositories until I encountered a repository that need more space to be dumped than the server has empty disk space.

So instead I switched to using "svnrdump dump" to dump the repositories onto a remote machine. As my root on the source server has no svn read access to the server I used my svn user account instead. That account has full read and write access to all the repositories. To be sure I dumped all repositories (not just the missing one) again with "svnrdump dump"

After I was done I ended up with some repositories that were dumped two times (one time with svnadmin and one time with svnrdump). I suddenly noticed that the size of one of the dumps was 115 MB for the dump created with "svnadmin dump" and only 78 MB for the dump created with "svnrdump dump".

The SVN server is a unix machine with SVN 1.6.17 and the remote machine used for svnrdump is a windows machine with Tortoise-SVN 1.9.4 and SVN 1.9.4.

So, now I am unsure if my dumps made with "svnrdump" are really correct. Can the different size be because of the difference between the two accounts (root of the server on the one hand and svn user on the other hand)? Or might it have something to do with the different versions of svn?

Regards, Sebastian

1
linuxwindowssvntortoisesvn
So, to clarify, you ran svnadmin dump on the machine the repository is hosted on, and you ran svnrdump on the client (your Windows machine)? Those are hugely different versions (1.6 vs 1.9); I would bet something changed between the two. – Patrick Quirk
Yes, your clarification is correct. The server we are using was set up some time ago (years?) and it seems it never got updated. I am not sure about how long because normally I have nothing to do with that server. (got the admin access just to dump the files) – Bachi

1 Answers

4
votes

When you used the 1.6.x client, the dump file contains the full info for every revision.

svn clients version 1.8.x and later only contain the delta info from revision to revision, so they're a lot smaller.

svnadmin dump has a switch --deltas to produce a dump using those deltas, which results in a smaller dump file. svnrdump does that unconditionally to reduce network traffic.