permanently delete a folder

Question

I am aware that the whole point of SVN is to never be able to delete anything permanently and my question is not about a "permanent delete" feature or similar.

It has come to my attention that code has been committed to our SVN repo by accident. It's code that belongs to another company and before there are any legal implications, I need to work out a way to remove this code permanently, including all traces of it ever being there.

Note 1: there has been other code revisions since.

Note 2: all the code that needs to be removed is contained under one folder

Note 3: the SVN is hosted with a third party in the cloud (Atlassian).

The way I am thinking now is:

• Do an SVN dump of all revisions and restore it locally
• "Delete" all data in the hosted SVN (How do I even do that?)
• And then sync the revisions on a per folder basis where I exclude the folder in question. I have imported revision history based on folders in the past so I know this is possible.

If there isn't any easier way, how do I delete / empty an entire SVN server or create a new one to replace the current one? Again, since our SVN is hosted with a third party, I can't access the file structure of the server itself but need to rely on SVN commands.

Answer 1

svndumpfilter is a command-line utility for removing history from a Subversion dump file by either excluding or including paths beginning with one or more named prefixes.

Basically you need to make a complete dump of repository, filter unwanted folders out of it, and import the rest as new repository. But since your repository is hosted by third party, I guess you need to arrange that kind of repository access first (unless they already provide some interface for that).