Permanently delete folder

Question

I know that the whole point of SVN is to never delete anything permanently, and my question is not about the "permanent delete" function or similar.

It occurred to me that the code was ported to our SVN repo by accident. This is a code belonging to another company, and before any legal consequences arise, I need to develop a way to delete this code permanently, including all its traces that have ever been there.

Note 1: since then there have been other versions of the code.

Note 2: all code that needs to be removed is contained in one folder

Note 3: SVN is hosted with a third party in the cloud (Atlassian).

Now I think:

• Reset SVN of all revisions and restore it locally
• Delete all data in hosted SVN (how to do this?)
• And then synchronize the changes in each folder where I exclude the specified folder. I have imported folder-based change history in the past, so I know this is possible.

If there is no simpler way, how can I delete / delete the whole SVN server or create a new one to replace the current one? Again, since our SVN is hosted by a third party, I cannot access the file structure of the server itself, but you need to rely on SVN commands.

Answer 1

svndumpfilter is a command line utility to remove history from a Subversion dump file by excluding or including paths starting with one or more named prefixes.

Basically you need to do a full dump of the repository, filter out unwanted folders and import the rest as a new repository. But since your repository is hosted by a third party, I think you need to first arrange for such access to the repository (if they no longer provide any interface for this).

Answer 2

For # 1 and # 3 in your plan, you can find the useful svnrdump utility. It has dump and load commands, like svnadmin, but it can work with remote repositories.