svn hotcopy error, but verify shows nothing and repo works fine

Question

I'm trying to backup my subversion repository with "svnadmin hotcopy" and getting the error:

svnadmin: E200002: Serialized hash missing terminator

After googling, I found out this error usually points to a corrupt repository and people recommend running "svnadmin verify" to check for errors. But this shows no errors on my repository, verifying every revision without trouble. I've also been using the repository daily without any issues for a long time.

Some more googling shows this bug report about running hotcopy on older repos that might be the issue I'm encountering:

http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/subversion-dev/201401.mbox/%3CCAP_GPNgmdQnh1Q49XFmDqZLOjk-rd1mZ_b_ak3StJBbpXy_35g@mail.gmail.com%3E

The responses on the bug report are too technical for me to fully decipher... if I'm reading it right, a fix would have been too inefficient to implement so they decided to leave the bug alone.

So how can I get around this problem and get hotcopy working on my repository again? Is there a way of upgrading my repository to a newer format that will work with hotcopy? Or is there another safe way of backing up my repository?

I'm running TortoiseSVN 1.8.10.26129 on Windows 7 x64. I also tried "Subversion for Windows" 1.8.10 and get the same errors.

Answer 1

Sometime ago I had the same problem. The svnadmin verifiy did not report any error. I tried to run svnadmin recovery and It told me that the version of the repository was to old. So I Ran svnadmin upgrade (https://serverfault.com/questions/208164/how-to-upgrade-v2-to-v3-fsfs-subversion-filesystem=) and then svnadmin recovery . And the problem was solved.