safe subversion backup with rsync

Let's say you have a subversion repository and you want to keep a backup on a remote host. Doing a "cp -R" is unsafe as is mentioned here, so your two safe methods of copying a subversion repo are 'svnadmin hotcopy' and 'svnadmin dump'. The former only makes a local copy, but the latter creates a single dumpfile on stdout, which is the most flexible method (though it does not grab repo configs).

The simple method to back up the repo from one host to another would be the following:

• ssh user@remote-host "svnadmin dump REPOSITORY" | svnadmin load REPOSITORY

That would create an identical copy of remote-host's repository on the local host. However, for big subversion repositories this could take a lot of time and bandwidth. Here is the form to use disk space to save time and bandwidth:

• ssh user@remote-host "svnadmin dump REPOSITORY > REPO.dump" && rsync -azP user@remote-host:REPO.dump REPO.dump && svnadmin load REPOSITORY < REPO.dump

This makes a dump on the remote host and rsync's the difference of the dump file to the local host. Note that the dump file is uncompressed and rather large, so if you have lots of spare cycles you can pipe the output of 'svnadmin dump' into 'lzma -c' and the opposite for 'svnadmin load'. (The rsync '-z' flag uses gzip compression, but lzma will save you much more space and thus possibly more time)

edit lol, i just realized compressing before rsync is probably pointless, other than reducing the size on local disk. also 'svnadmin hotcopy' is probably the exact same if not better than dumping to a local file vs piping from one host to another (and saves the config).