SVN Error - Not a working copy

If you get a "not a working copy" when doing a recursive svn cleanup my guess is that you have a directory which should be a working copy (i.e. the .svn directory at the top level says so), but it is missing its own .svn directory. In that case, you could try to just remove/move that directory and then do a local update (i.e. rm -rf content; svn checkout content).

If you get a not a working copy error, it means that Subversion cannot find a proper .svn directory in there. Check to see if there is an .svn directory in contents

The ideal solution is a fresh checkout, if possible.

I got into a similar situation (svn: 'papers' is not a working copy directory) a different way, so I thought I'd post my battle story (simplified):

$ svn add papers
svn: Can't create directory 'papers/.svn': Permission denied

Oops! fix permissions... then:

$ svn add papers
svn: warning: 'papers' is already under version control
$ svn st
~     papers
$ svn cleanup
svn: 'papers' is not a working copy directory

And even moving papers out of the way and running svn up (which worked for the OP) didn't fix it. Here's what I did:

$ mv papers papers_
$ svn cleanup
$ svn revert papers
Reverted 'papers'
$ mv papers_/ papers
$ svn add papers

That worked.