I wanted to convert one of our production machines from Fedora to Ubuntu server. One of the services this machine was running was subversion.

I both tarred up the repository directory and used ‘svnadmin dump’ to backup the repository. I scp’ed both files to another server.

Upon recovery I wanted to use the dump but the dump file became corrupted.

Luckily, there’s an easy way to recover from a repository file backup. I just untarred the repository and used

svadmin recover

It worked great!