Code On A Stick

Preface

I’m not an expert in SVN version control and I don’t like using command line. I’m regular Windows user and so it was easy for me to learn how to use “Commit” and “Update” buttons in TortoiseSVN. It was easy until one day when I had to figure out how to restore delete folders.

A day when sources disappeared

One beautiful morning I checked out my sources from SVN and discovered that the most of the files and folders are gone. Apparently the night before one of the developers was cleaning SVN working folder on his machine and … Well, if you don’t know what that big red button is for it might be not a good idea to press it…

So, if don’t know what to do - ask Google. Google said - don’t worry, it’s impossible to lose anything in SVN, just do the reverse merge using following command line params… 

The problem is I didn’t want to use command line. I wanted to use beautiful TortoiseSVN UI for that. So, I found “Revert to this revision” and “Revert changes from this revision” and thought my problem is solved, but for some reason SVN was failing this task with an error “‘/svn/sources/!svn/bc/373/Test’ path not found“. Finally, after asking an SVN expert, I figured that there was a small detail which I was missing. The revision of your working copy has to be a “HEAD”.

Steps to recover deleted files or undo the submit in SVN:

1. Get the HEAD revision from SVN it to your working folder. Working folder is the key word here. (I suggest using temporary folder)
2. Click on Show Log
3. In the Log window, select revision you want to undo and click on the “Revert changes from this version” in the popup menu. This will execute the merge command of the corresponding revisions.
4. Wait for SVN to update your working folder. Working folder is the key word again. SVN updates your working folder first, so you can review the change before you commit it to SVN.
5. Make sure your sources merged correctly and then commit the change to SVN.

Best luck recovering your sources!

-=Oleg=-