Delete a file or archive it?

Question

When a file is not needed anymore, what is the "best practice" to do? Delete it from the repository, or move it to an 'notneededfiles_archive' in the repository?

I would like to delete them, but I don't know if there is an easy way to list all deleted files. The archive option, you can see directly all deleted files, and if you need one back just look in there... But after a while it could be huge folder... (if you delete a lot :) )

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

The standard thing to do is svn rm, which makes the item disappear, but leaves it in the history, so you can recover it again later if you need to.

Many svn installs include viewvc or similar visual tools that allow you to see old revisions, and then download the contents if you need them. From command-line, the svn command also allows checkouts from specific revs, and of course important versions should be 'tagged' with svn cp.

If you are really suffering from disk space problems, you can consider administrative actions to remove the history, too, but that probably means that you are misusing the source control system in the first place.