Recover a deleted file in Subversion

May 29th, 2008 By: brian

SVN is great for keeping our projects under tight control. Occasionally, we have the need to get something back that was deleted in a previous revision. So I can remember how to do it next time, here it is:

$ svn copy -r 1234 url/to/deleted/file path/to/recovered/file

This will copy the file at the revision specified to the new file in the “restore to path” part. You can find the revision by doing an ’svn log –verbose’ of the directory it was in. That’s all there is to it!

My theme seems to be restoring and recovering… is that a bad thing?

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 11:40 am and is filed under SVN, Subversion.

1. Tarun Says:
   May 1st, 2009 at 1:36 pm
   If you are giving the repository url, the -r or –revision parameter doesnt work.
   instead specify the old revision by appending @revision-number to end of the old file url.
   svn copy svn://repo-path/file-path@old-revision-number relative-path-to-new-location
   example -
   cd working-copy/mydir
   svn copy svn://www.example.com/myproject/mydir/myfile@21 .
   will copy the the file ‘myfile’ from revision 21 into the current directory.
2. Clifton Says:
   November 12th, 2009 at 10:26 pm
   Your forgot a hyphen in the svn log command:
   svn log –verbose
   Thanks!
3. Frank Says:
   January 14th, 2010 at 2:56 pm
   I was not able to use the @revision syntax, but -r worked just fine.
   The following command restored a deleted README file (with log entries back to 1993!) in my current working directory:
   svn copy -r http:////README .
   – Thanks for the help!
4. Frank Says:
   January 14th, 2010 at 3:01 pm
   Sorry, but that last post got scrambled; blame it on careless use of angle brackets.
   Hopefully, this version of the command will come through unscathed:
   svn copy -rrevision_number_where_deletedhttp://svn_machine_name/svn_repository_path/README .
5. Shiv Says:
   February 19th, 2010 at 7:04 pm
   Do you happen to know if there’s a difference between doing it the way you proposed versus using TortoiseSVN right-click feature as mentioned here?
   http://tortoisesvn.net/most-forgotten-feature
   I tried the TSVN way, and it seemed to work for me. That is, all of the log history is still retained.