Does "svnadmin dump" lock the repository?

Question

... what happens if someone tries to commit during a svnadmin dump REPOS_PATH?

The subversion book doesn't say anything about that.

Transcribe

Answer 1

A concurrently running svnadmin dump will not interfere with new commits. The resulting dump file, however, will only contain the revisions that were present in the repository when you started svnadmin dump.

You'll need to grab commits made while the initial dump was running with a second dump.

Other options you might be interested in:

svnadmin hotcopy
Unlike a dump file, this will include conf and hooks.

svnsync
For maintaining a read-only clone of an existing repository.

Of the three, I make the most use of svnsync. It allows me to keep a second copy of our repositories on a separate machine, which is closer to me. This makes for a nice backup, as well as for faster checkouts. (If the svnsync clone and the original have the same UUID, you can svn co svn://the-clone and then svn switch --relocate svn://the-clone https://the-original)

Expediential

I didn't know dumping won't interfere with repo changes. Thanks for telling us. (Do you have a reference for this?) – Cockcrow

No, I don't have a reference, though I recall it coming up in a discussion on the subversion user's mailing list some time ago. I've looked, but can't find the thread. So, I just tried it out by making commits to one of my repositories while I was dumping it. – Expediential

The thread I was thinking of is the one that starts with this message: subversion.tigris.org/ds/… but be warned, the OP is aggressively stupid. – Expediential

How can we restore the user access rights and users after loading the dump file back to another server? If both the source and the target file systems are fsfs would be enough to use the svnadmin hotcopy command to achieve that? stackoverflow.com/questions/10186527 – Premonitory