Extracting files from an SVN repository backup

Say you’ve got a backup of an old SVN repository. You want to grab a couple of files, but the backup looks like this:

C:myrepo_backup    format    README.txt    conf    dab    db    hooks    locks

You figure you probably need to run some fiddly import commands to restore it into a live SVN server so you can connect and browse it right? Wrong! SVN has a feature that makes this incredibly easy: the client can browse and check out directly from a backed up repository on your own local file system.

All you need to do is use the file:// URL scheme and point to your backup, for example:

svn checkout file:///C:/myrepo_backup myrepo

And yes if you’re using Windows, TortoiseSVN does support this — so you can very easily use Repo-browser to explore any SVN backup. Very handy!