TortoiseSVN downgrade issue from 1.8 to 1.7

Question

I was using the TortoiseSVN 1.7.11 client (Windows 7). I updated it to 1.8 and then it worked for some time with the 1.8 release. But other machines with which I'm working are still using 1.7.11, and I can't upgrade them so I thought of downgrading to 1.7.11. Now it's not working at all. I took a fresh checkout and it still asks to upgrade the working copy.

When I click this option, it says "can't upgrade as it is not a pre-1.7 working copy directory. Missing default entry. I tried removing registries and delete configuration information from %appdata% folder too, but it doesn't fix the issue.

Answer 1

For people who don't read the comments first.

• Backup any changes you have in your working directory
• Uninstall TortoiseSVN 1.8
• Reboot
• Install TortoiseSVN 1.7
• Do a fresh checkout into a new directory
• Manually copy any needed changes from your backup to new directory

Answer 2

Ther is no need to check out to a separate directory and lose local changes.

After downgrading to TortoiseSVN 1.7 it is possible to recreate the SVN 1.7 format by:

• Removing all the .svn directories

  for /d /r . %d in (.svn) do @if exist "%d" rd /s/q "%d"
  

• Checkout using --force:

  svn co --force <repo_url> <local_dir>