Is there a way to recover from an accidental "svn revert"?

I managed to shoot myself in the foot this morning by doing the following:

1. Started working on a change to my project
2. Made a bunch of edits to a bunch of files
3. Realized that my approach was all wrong, and that I needed to start over
4. cd'd to the top level of my project and did a "svn --recursive revert ." to restore my local sandbox to its pre-changes state.
5. Howled in horror as I realized that there had been a number of other changes outstanding in my local sandbox, and I had just obliterated all of them. (the svn server had been down last Friday so I hadn't been able to check them in, and I had forgot about them over the weekend)

Fortunately in this case I had done an "svn diff > temp.txt" before leaving work on Friday, and the temp.txt file was still on my hard drive, so I was able to feed that file into "patch" and recover my lost changes.

But for my future reference (i.e. the next time I make the same dumb mistake)... is there any way to tell svn to undo an "svn revert"? Does svn keep a backup of the local/not-checked-in diffs anywhere?

Solution 1:

There is a solution... go to your recycle bin you'll find there the latest version of the deleted file. Tortoise "throwing" to the recycle bin every file that it revert.

Solution 2:

No, (absolutely) NO.

If you say to Subversion it should revert a file, all changes are gone by the wind.

Only your memory can get them back.

Exception: New files you had added, will only lose their status "added", but the file will remain in this directory, only status is unknown("?")

Platform / Software exception: Using TortoiseSVN on Windows, Revert first throws the files into Recycle Bin and then reverts them. You can dig into the Recycle Bin to recover the files.

Solution 3:

Not really Subversion specific, but if you're working with Eclipse, you can try your luck in the local history.

Now, something a little bit more Subversion specific: if you don't want to make a branch for every change you do, you can keep a couple of trunk checked out locally (trunk-modif-1, trunk-modif-2...). Each "modification" is done on a separate tree and you only need to keep a list of which check out correspond to which modification.

Or you could use Git locally but I never tried it.

Solution 4:

Recently did this mistake of not committing new file changes (about 10) onto SVN and they all vanished because of my silly mistake. But what saved me was the windows "Restore previous versions" option in the context menu. Phew that was a relief and lesson learnt.

Solution 5:

You can't recover the files, if you are using svn command-line client.

But you can recover them, if you are using TortoiseSVN as your svn client. TortoiseSVN will automatically move them to your Recycle Bin. You can restore them from there after an accidental revert.

This is a configurable option in TortoiseSVN. It is under Settings -> Dialog 1 -> Use recycle bin when reverting.

By default it is checked, which means files are moved to recycle bin. If you want(mostly you don't care to disable this. If you have a reason, please let me also know)