Missing revision in SVN repository

6
votes

Apparently one of the old revisions has disappeared from an svn repository:

svn checkout http... myrepo
svn: REPORT of '/svn/myrepo/!svn/vcc/default': Could not read chunk size: connection was closed by server (http://localhost)

$ svnadmin verify myrepo
* Verified revision 0.
...
svnadmin: No such revision 262

$ svn log -v -r 262
svn: No such revision 262

$ ll /var/SVN/myrepo/db/revs/0/
...
-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data  27289777 2010-10-21 22:21 260
-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data   4727180 2010-11-12 18:51 261
-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data   2180586 2010-11-14 20:33 263
...

Searching on the issue says "restore from backup", but all 3 backups I have all have this missing revision, so it must have been going for a while. I only noticed it when I couldn't commit a specific file. I have a current working copy. What can I do short of starting from scratch ?!?

1
svnsvnadmin

1 Answers

1
votes

Do you have access to the raw repository? you can verify if the revision is missing by going into the repository folder, then under the db folder and you will see a series of folders. For rev 262 it will be in a folder '0' which contains all of the revisions from 0-999. It is possible to remove revisions from repositories with care. We have done this when a file or files were committed that for whatever reason were not supposed to be part of the repo. You can delete them using svn commands, but they can still be retrieved by specifying a revision. Is it possible that someone could have done an operation like this?

Word of caution- Mucking in the repository can cause problems even if you know what you are doing? You may want to make a copy of the repo prior to investigating to keep from corrupting it in case things go awry.