Migrating VisualSVN Server from one Windows install to another

Question

I have VisualSVN Server on my Vista laptop. The repository resides on the second hard drive. I am doing a clean install of Windows 7 in the next few days.

How do I configure or install VisualSVN Server again and keep the users, repositories, and settings intact from the previous installation?

Answer 1

You can simply copy the folder containing the repositories (e.g. c:\repositories) to the new machine. That folder contains all the users (in the file htpasswd) and the access rights (authz).

Note: this is true if you're using subversion authentication. I'm not sure if it's the same when using windows authentication, but I guess it is, since there's also a file named (authz-windows).

Detailed instructions:

• on the new server, install VisualSVN server
• during the installation, you are asked where the repositories should be put (the default is c:\repositories)
• once the server is installed, go to the old machine and open the VisualSVN Server Manager
• right-click the VisualSVN Server (local) entry in the console and click Properties
• it the dialog you can find where the repositories are currently located
• copy everything contained in that folder to the new server's repository folder (e.g. c:\repositories)
• maybe you'll have to restart the server, but then everything should be up and running

Answer 2

The roles/users are stored in the files groups.conf and htpasswd under the "Repositories" folder and can be copied to the new server. The individual permissions for each repo are stored in the VisualSVN-SvnAuthz file under "Repositories\your-repo\conf" and can also be copied as-is.

The best way to transfer the data history of the repos without getting incompatible file system errors is to create a dump file for each repo, then copy the dump file to the new server and import the dump file on the new server. You need to use the command line tool available in the VisualSVN Management console to create these dump files. Visual SVN has good documentation for the specifics here: http://www.visualsvn.com/support/topic/00010/