svnadmin hotcopy hangs indefinitely

Question

I'm implementing a backup strategy for a Subversion repository.

I chose incremental backup on local NAS. I mounted the NAS over Samba and tried to hotcopy my test repository (that has few commits and weighs 320KB).

svnadmin hotcopy --incremental /path/to/original /path/to/backup

The problem is that the program hangs indefinitely!

How to fix? CTRL+C won't work

[Edit] Seems that this happens ONLY when I push to Samba storage. If I hotcopy to my local drive it will just complete successfully

Answer 1

Can it be that your test repo was on BDB fs?

As described in the section called “Berkeley DB”, hot-copied Berkeley DB repositories are not portable across operating systems, nor will they work on machines with a different “endianness” than the machine where they were created.

If you attempt to use Berkeley DB on a noncompliant remote filesystem, the results are unpredictable—you may see mysterious errors right away, or it may be months before you discover that your repository database is subtly corrupted. You should strongly consider using the FSFS data store for repositories that need to live on a network share.