Unable to do an SVN dump -- Error E720002 and format errors

Question

I'm new to SVN, so forgive the possible straightforward problem. I'm trying to do an Subversion dump of one of my projects:

svnadmin dump C:\code\project1 -r 9 > repo.dmp

Unfortunately I'm getting this error:

svnadmin: E720002: Can't open file 'project1\format': The system cannot 
find the file specified.

It appears to be looking for the format file which is actually located at project1\.svn\format. This has me puzzled as I'd expect it to look in the .svn subdirectory of project1, but instead is looking in the root.

I then tried:

svnadmin dump project1\.svn -r 9 > repo.dmp

But this resulted in:

svnadmin: E165005: Expected repository format '3' or '5'; found format '12'

I thought this was an issue with my format being out of data since that is a common issue from what I've read. My server is repositoryhosting.com and they are on 1.7.1 server. On my client, I am using TortoiseSVN with SVN:

TortoiseSVN 1.7.4, Build 22459 - 64 Bit Subversion 1.7.2

Upon further reading, I might be confusing things and needing to go against the actual repository instead of my local working copy. Problem is that the repository is in the cloud hosted by repositoryhosting.com and svnadmin won't accept URLs as repo locations, only local paths.

would love some help with what's going on...

Solution

svnadmin dump is for working on the repository(server side), not the working copy (client side) The errormessage about format is misleading as it searches for the format file in repository and finds a file with same name in your workingcopy.

If you are interested to get a full backup of your repository you can use svnrdump for this purpose. It is used the same way than svnadmin dump, however it is possible to get the dump from an remote repository: use

svnrdump  dump -r0:HEAD [URL_TO_YOUR_REPO] > Your_dumpfile.dmp

THIS IS A NEW SVN 1.7 FEATURE