Failed to reset SVN - Error E720002 and format errors

Question

I am new to SVN, so I am asking for a simple problem. I am trying to make a Subversion dump of one of my projects:

svnadmin dump C:\code\project1 -r 9 > repo.dmp 

Sorry, I get this error:

 svnadmin: E720002: Can't open file 'project1\format': The system cannot find the file specified. 

It seems to be looking for a format file that is actually located in project1\.svn\format . This puzzled me, as I expect him to look into the .svn subdirectory, but instead is looking in the root.

Then I tried:

 svnadmin dump project1\.svn -r 9 > repo.dmp 

But this led to:

 svnadmin: E165005: Expected repository format '3' or '5'; found format '12' 

I thought this was a problem with the lack of data in my format, as this is a common problem from what I read. My server is repositoryhosting.com and they are on server 1.7.1. On my client, I am using TortoiseSVN with SVN:

TortoiseSVN 1.7.4, Build 22459 - 64 bit Subversion 1.7.2

On further reading, I might confuse things and should go against the real repository instead of my local working copy. The problem is that the repository is in the cloud hosted by repositoryhosting.com and svnadmin will not accept URLs as repo locations, but only local paths.

I would like to help with what is happening ...

Answer 1

svnadmin dump is designed to work in the repository (on the server side), and not from the working copy (on the client side) Format errors are misleading because it searches for the format file in the repository and finds the file with the same name in your working copy.

If you are interested in getting a full backup of your repository, you can use svnrdump for this purpose. It is used in the same way as svnadmin dump, however, you can get a dump from the remote repository: use

 svnrdump dump -r0:HEAD [URL_TO_YOUR_REPO] > Your_dumpfile.dmp 

THIS IS A NEW FEATURE OF SVN 1.7