Experience with local version control of SVN working copy?

Question

At my place of work, we use SVN and TortoiseSVN (Windows XP) as a client. I have a longish commute and work offline during that.
Now, I'd like to have some sort of "extended undo" locally; i.e. I would like to have local version control of my SVN working copy, in order to dare to refactor for example.
Switching altogether to e.g. git, mercurial etc. is not an option as the company uses SVN.

What I'd like to know is if someone has any experience in versioning the local SVN working copy, perhaps by running a local git or similar?
Are there any potential drawbacks? (perhaps messing with .svn folders or similar)

Answer 1

I use Git as a local Subversion client for work and it works great. When you do a git svn clone of a Subversion repository, the checkout you get does not have the hidden .svn directories, but instead is a complete Git repository in its own right. The ability to use local, lightweight branches to organise my own development is a killer feature for me.

Other features I use all the time are git stash, staged commits, and git add -p.