Automatic Backup with SVN on Windows

September 12th, 2008 by Aaron

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A while ago, I decided that I needed to have a better backup solution for my file server. After doing some research on various systems, I let my inner programmer take over - in addition to my desire to NEVER LOSE ANYTHING - and I defaulted to use SVN.

I was using a Windows machine as my file server - so I wrote some batch files. I also had SVN installed on the machine. The final touch was adding scheduled tasks.

The setup includes a computer that is always on with windows, svn command line, and 5 directories to monitor for backups.

First thing’s first, do an SVN Checkout

The very first thing I did was make an SVN checkout in all of the five parent directories. This way I can continue to use SVN add, svn commit without any other interaction. Don’t worry, we’ll use recursion!

Create the full list of backups

So, first thing’s first: Create the list of directories that need to be monitored. I made them in this txt file named ’svndirectories.txt’:

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D:\pictures D:\storage\videos\misc D:\storage\files\art D:\storage\files\NeverAgain D:\storage\files\Therapee

Note, all of them are separated by a space. This becomes important in our next batch script.

Schedule the SVN Add

I added an SVN Add batch script at Midnight on sundays. Actually, there are two batch files. I made them separately so that I could invoke a scheduled task - but also run the “add” by hand if need be.

The first file, addsvn.bat:

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@echo off

REM ------------------------------------------------------------------
REM - forces adds on all svn files
REM ------------------------------------------------------------------
 
 
:START
REM - Get file to process
set direct=%1
echo %direct%
echo.
 
:SVNADD
svn add --force %direct%\*
 
:NEXTFILE
shift
if "%1"=="" goto END
goto START
 
 
:END

That will force an add of each file passed in on the command line. Then, the batch file that I made to be ran from the scheduler will read in the folders from the text file, and run this script. Here is ’scheduled_addsvn.bat’:

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@echo off
REM - This is what should be scheduled to add files to svn repos

REM - read in svndirectories.txt
for /f "tokens=*" %%a in ('type svndirectories.txt 2^>NUL') do set value=%%a

REM - call the addsvn program with all the directories
addsvn %value%

Theoretically, I could have called it with the entire line of files after it, but I wanted to call them separately to handle errors better.

After all of these have been added, lets move on…

Schedule SVN Commit

Just in case I made a huge addition of files, I let an hour pass between scheduled add and scheduled commits. Additionally, I ran the commit every day instead of every week. I figured I’d make more changes than I would make additions.

So first, read in all of the directories again and run the commit. Then, the file to schedule. These are pretty much similar, just different commands:

commitsvn.bat:

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@echo off

REM ------------------------------------------------------------------
REM - commits all SVN changes
REM ------------------------------------------------------------------
 
 
:START
REM - Get file to process
set direct=%1
echo %direct%
echo.
 
:SVNCOMMIT
svn commit --message="Auto Backup" %direct%\*
 
:NEXTFILE
shift
if "%1"=="" goto END
goto START
 
 
:END

scheduled_commitsvn.bat:

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@echo off
REM - This is what should be scheduled to commit files to svn repos

REM - read in svndirectories.txt
for /f "tokens=*" %%a in ('type svndirectories.txt 2^>NUL') do set value=%%a

REM - call the addsvn program with all the directories
commitsvn %value%

This has worked out pretty well for me. If you see anything I could do better, please let me know!

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Tags: scripting, svn, windows

This entry was posted on Friday, September 12th, 2008 at 8:30 am and is filed under scripting • svn • windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Automatic Backup with SVN on Windows”

1. john.reeves Says:
   September 12th, 2008 at 9:30 am

   aww, cute little batch files *snicker*.

   good idea. I thought of this exact thing, never tried it though. I was thinking it’d be awesome to make a file system in linux that uses svn (using FUSE, similar to how the GmailFS works). My main concern was binary files, as I don’t think there’s an efficient way to deal with those. Awesome that you did it though.

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