Subversion Discussion

[JosephLloyd]

Hey everyone, I wanted to know what are you using for subversion?  What works for you and what features do you need for you or your team?

If you're not using subversion, it will save your life!  Do it, seriously.

I have been using TortoiseSVN for a while now, I like the shell integration and its nice and free.  Some time ago I moved my repository from being locally stored and manually backed up on my laptop to hosted on our network server using Callbnet's Subversion Edge.  Collabnet's solution lets me use multiple development machines within our network, or allows multiple developers to work together on projects, which is rather useful.

One problem with subversion is that it doesn't support network storage of repositories, even with something like Subversion Edge, the repository has to be local to a machine.  When I set it up, I configured it to backup the repositories to the same physical disk on the server, since it was the only one larg enough.  Yesterday that disk drive burned up, destroying my repositories and the latest backups.  Not an ideal situation to be in.

Jeff had mentioned using an additional third party software to backup the repositories to a network drive or NAS.  Do any of you use something like this?  Is there another subversion server software that will do this as part of its feature set?

Also, do any of you allow remote access to your repositories?  What sort of setup are you using, an apache server like Collabnet's Edge?  Companies like Collabnet offer expensive fully managed solutions, such as their TeamForge, which have a lot of value, but especially for us with small teams or single developers its not as practical to be purchasing such a complete solution.  So what have you had success with?

[jdebuhr]

Joseph,

Here is what I have been using with success so far. I am running VisualSVN (http://www.visualsvn.com/) Server. it is the free version so I have the same limitation of the repositories being on the local drive of the machine. I wanted to have a backup kept on a network server that also gets a tape backup to dot his I use Syncback (http://www.2brightsparks.com/syncback/index.html) that runs a scheduled routine to back up my local repository directory to the network. That should save me from hard disk failure.

On my Development machines I have TortoiseSVN installed as well and have no complaints on it. For the way I use it, it works nicely

[DarrenJones]

+1 for VisualSVN and TortoiseSVN.  Been using them for a long time, no complaints, recommended.

There are a few decentralized systems out there (like mercurial, mercurial.selenic.com) that seem to be the next generation of source control.  We've looked into it but haven't made any changes.  I'd be curious to hear if anyone is using a decentralized source control system.

cheers

Darren

[weidman3000]

I am also using TortoiseSVN with Collabnet Edge. I find that Collabnet offers more features for its free version than VisualSVN. Visual seems to hold back some key features in order to entice you to pay.

As far as back-up is concerned, I have been dumping the repositories into the network drive on a regular basis. If you login as Super Admin to Collabnet and go to "Server Settings", you can choose the Backup directory to be mapped to your network drive (instead of the standard C:\csvn\data\dumps). Make sure that the computer you have the server set up on has full access to the network file you use for the backup directory or else you will get an error when you try to save the settings.

After that, all you have to do is schedule automatic repository dumps and each repository will be periodically saved in a zip file on the network. This way if your hard drive ever crashes again, you can simply load the dump files into new repositories.

I hope this helps!

[JosephLloyd]

Thank you, thats all quite helpful!  I'm setting Collabnet up on a different server now, so I'll try to set the backup to a mapped network drive, I didn't realize you could do that.  Does anyone have any experience with remote access?  I'm considering using a dynamic dns solution for the svn server.  What sort of security issues should I look for? Do any dynamic dns services provide inconsistant availability?

I too woulud be very interested if anyne were using a distrubted source control system, the concept is really interesting.

Also, syncback looks great!  I think I'll use it for a couple of things, thank you.