Is it possible to recover certain SVN revision by reverse merge?

Question

I have TortoiseSVN 1.8.7 + VisualSVN Server 2.7.7 installed on my PC (Windows Server 2012). Recently my colleague told me when he try to update, "The XML response contains invalid XML" error appeared after the dialog listed several updated files. When he update again, the working copy is locked and need cleanup.

I'm using the same repository as my colleague, but I can update and commit without problem.

After investigation, I found disk error in Event Viewer, and when I opened the log, I can not see log earlier than 6291. I tried to open the file "project\db\rev\6290", and after 10~15 sec., the content is empty, and more disk error is appeared in Event Viewer. I copied all files with robocopy to another disk, only the file above is failed.

I thought these revision files are like diff files, so maybe I can use working copy(currently r6295) and project\db\6291~6295 to "reverse merge" to 6290? Is it possible?

Solution 1

Reverse merge won't help here.

At first, it makes sense to determine the root cause of the error your colleague gets. You say that you don't get the error, so it brings us to the following questions:

• Is his working copy broken? Run svn cleanup against the working copy and see whether the error persists. It also makes sense to attempt reproducing the error with a clean working copy, e.g. run svn checkout and see whether you get the error or not.

• Is the repository corrupted? Run svnadmin verify -q against the repository and check it's output. I guess that in your case the repository is healthy but if it is not, then the easiest solution would be to restore the repository from a backup.

Solution 2

While running Kapersky Endpoint Security 10.0 on my company laptop, I encountered this error repeatedly within a minute or so of initiating a checkout of a large source branch.

Temporarily disabling the Kapersky protection solved the issue for me.

Comments

[Vinix Wu]

Is his working copy broken? No, svn cleanup didn't help. Is the repository corrupted? Yes, r6290 is broken. The content of file "project\db\rev\6290" is missing. I've tried "svn verify" and find r2289 is broken too and recovered it from backup. However, I don't have backup for r6290.