subversion on a local drive problem

Question

I am setting up subversion using this link http://svn.spears.at/ It says that "As the Subversion book warns, make sure to create all repositories on your local disks [FiberChannel is treated as a local disk]. Failing to do so, may result in repository corruption. " This us a big problem for me. Isnt there a way I can set subversion on shared drives. Is there a work around because availability is a major concern with local drives.

Answer 1

Sure you can, but it probably isn't a good idea. You didn't mention what protocol you are using for sharing, but that may matter, and you didn't mention if you where going to use BDB or FSFS.

For safety purposes your SVN needs to be able to lock the files while it is using them. It needs a commit to actually result in the data being committed to to disk, usually you can only be certain about things like this on drives the OS sees as directly attached.

If you look at the Repository Data-Stores section of the manual you will see that FSFS is supported on network filesystems at the cost of performance.

If you are concerned about availability issues, you might be better off setting up your repository on the local drive, and then schedule a backup or setup one of the various SVN mirroring systems so a copy of your repository is kept somewhere else as well.