Why does SVN take so much space?

Question

I am working on a large sized project that is about 1020 MB in size. This is because, apart from the code, we have other resources, like graphics, XML configurations, etc. in the version control.

The size of the .svn-base files is about 998 MB, making the total checkout size about 2 GB. By my understanding .svn-base is meta information and its size shouldn't be that much.

Why does SVN need so much space?

Answer 1

If there are many updates to your working copy, it might grow in size, even more than the checked out contents might suggest. Running svn cleanup will free this space again.

Answer 2

So that svn revert doesn't need to contact the server.

SVN actually stores another copy of the file locally. That's why the .svn dirs sum up to be almost as the project code base itself.