svnadmin load error

Question

I am getting an error when trying to restore a svn repository taken from another machine. The error is

svnadmin: Dump stream contains a malformed header (with no ':') at

The dump was created on a subversion 1.5 server and I am loading to a new subversion 1.6 server. I was able to load several other repositories successfully to the new server. The new server is VisualSVN Server.

score 5 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 13 '10 at 02:41

5

Try to cleanup your dump first

grep --binary-files=text -v '^* Dumped revision' ./repository.dump > ./repository.clear-dump

then try to load the new clean dump

svnadmin load /new/path/to/your/repository < ./repository.clear-dump

answered Oct 13 '10 at 02:41

William Notowidagdo

611
7
19

1

this worked for me , i actually piped the stdout and stderr into the dumpfile. – Suyash Jain Sep 07 '16 at 05:40
The mentioned pipe command: `grep --binary-files=text -v '^* Dumped revision' mydumpfile.txt | svnadmin load mynewrepo`. Don't forget to create a repository by `svnadmin create mynewrepo`. – bekce Mar 11 '17 at 15:20

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 27 '09 at 09:00

2

as far as I know (I cannot see the dump..), this happens by piping the stdout and stderr into the dumpfile.

So you should dump again and only take stdout into your dump file.

Did you see the output while dumping the repository("*Dumped revision 10", "*Dumped Revision 11" ..etc)?

answered Aug 27 '09 at 09:00

Peter Parker

29,093
5
52
80

1

The output doesn't contain any "Dumped revision..." messages. It does have Windows CR/LF pairs which I don't think should be a problem. – Chief A-G Aug 31 '09 at 18:29
can you show us the lines of the dump svn is complaining about? – Peter Parker Sep 01 '09 at 01:50

score 0 · Answer 3 · edited Oct 02 '12 at 13:22

0

I wanted to add. I had the same problem as Luc M. My svnadmin load REPO_PATH < file.svn command just would not work, the error was cryptic, I could not work it out. So I tried using tar.exe from my Cygwin install again on the tar file that I had and presto it worked. I also had a tar file that had been zipped, but I used WinZip to extract the TAR and I think that corrupted it.

edited Oct 02 '12 at 13:22

Andrew Barber

39,603
20
94
123

answered Aug 23 '12 at 00:10

Carlos

1

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Jun 25 '14 at 07:29

I've had the same message recently, and in the end, it happened that I had transferred SVN dumps by FTP without explicitly asking for binary transfers, so the dumps had been transferred in ASCII format. Since the FTP server was a Windows machine, the dumps had been corrupted with Windows line ends. Therefore, my recommendation is the following: check your line ends. Hope this helps at least a little.

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Oct 11 '11 at 20:53

I had the same problem.

I wanted to import a dump file created on a Linux Box. The file has been "tar" and gzipped.

My file was a "tar.gz"

I used Winzip to uncompressed it and I couldn't upload it using cygwin.

Then I used cygwin command tar -xvzf to unzip it and I was able to load it into my new repository.

svnadmin load error

5 Answers5