I recently helped a team to switch SVN servers and found a few gotchas along the way. This is a short guide on what worked for me and some stuff I tried that didn’t.
The reason for migrating to a new subversion server was that Atlassian shut down their hosted subversion service. The team had been dragging out on the migration for far too long (there was more than a year’s notice). When they asked me for help, there were only a few days left before the old service was shut down. They said that they had considered moving to git and that there was probably a server set up somewhere by the operations department.
I had a quick look at the repo and asked the team about their situation and found out a number of facts to take in consideration for a move.
A gziped dump of the repo was about 1.3GB
The repo had not followed the standard trunk/branches/tag structure. A few levels below a trunk directory I found another set of directories: trunk, branches, tags.
The repo contained code from different projects. Some legacy that were no longer needed, some being actively developed.
There was no time for a long service window. I basically had to get everything moved from one working day to another.
