How to identify and potentially remove big binary commits inside an SVN repository?

Question

I am working with an SVN repository that is over 3 years old, contains over 6,100 commits and is over 1.5 GB in size. I want to reduce the size of the SVN repository (I'm not talking about the size of a full SVN export - I mean the full repository as it would exist on the server) before moving it to a new server.

The current repository contains the source code for all of our software projects but it also contains relatively large binary files of no significance such as:

• Full installers for a number of 3rd party tools.
• .jpg & .png files (which are unmodified exports of PSDs that live in the same folder).
• Bin and Obj folders (which are then 'svn ignored' the next commit).
• Resharper directories.

A number of these large files have been 'SVN deleted' since they were added, creating a further problem of identifing the biggest offenders.

I want to either:

• Create a new SVN repository that contains only the code for all of the software projects - it is really important that the copied files maintain their SVN history from the old repository.
• Remove the large binary commits and files from the existing repository.

Are either of these possible?

Answer 1

Otherside is right about svnadmin dump, etc. Something like this will get you a rough pointer to revisions that added lots of data to your repo, and are candidates for svndumpfilter:

for r in `svn log -q | grep ^r | cut -d ' ' -f 1 | tr -d r`; do
   echo "revision $r is " `svn diff -c $r | wc -c` " bytes";
done

You could also try something like this to find revisions that added files with a particular extension (here, .jpg):

svn log -vq | egrep "^r|\.jpg$" | grep -B 1 "\.jpg$"