How do I change the HEAD to a previous revision

Question

We've got a situation where someone messed up a Commit to our SVN server. A lot of files were deleted, etc.

Question: What is the technique for making the previous (to the bad Commit) revision the HEAD revision? I've seen discussion here on SO for doing this for 1 file, but we'd like to make it like that last commit never happened. Any ideas?

All of these answers seem to be correct. I marked abatishchev's answer as the correct answer simply because I'm using Tortoise SVN and it's the method I actually used.

Answer 1

The cleanest way would be to undo changes

You can use svn merge to “undo” the change in your working copy, and then commit the local modification to the repository. All you need to do is to specify a reverse difference. (You can do this by specifying --revision 303:302, or by an equivalent --change -303.)

I realize it does not "make it like that last commit never happened" in the sense that commit is still part of history, but I believe it is better to keep that bad commit in the history.
It could include some work in progress that can be queried / compared to, in order to easily remake a new proper commit.

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Even if:

• the SVN (1.5) manual mention a future obliterate command that would accomplish the task of permanently deleting information, and
• mention svndumpfilter as a possible workaround (in that it provides the ability to quickly and easily modify that dumpfile data by acting as a path-based filter)

... It is better to not try twisting a SCM tool into something it is not meant to do in the first place.
Historization (along with parallelization with branching) are the two main features of an SCM.

Answer 2

Maybe you can show log, check previous revision (n-1), in context menu choose Revert to this revision and commit the changes (it will becomes n+1, where n is current bad head)

Answer 3

You can do this using svnadmin dump and svnadmin load. It's quite a brute force way to do it, but I believe that's the only way to do it.

The answers to this question may help: Nuking huge file in svn repository