For the last few years we’ve used Assembla to host source control (Subversion) for one of our projects. We signed up for a free hosting plan, and later on, when Assembla switched to pay-only plans, they graciously allowed us to continue using them for no charge. We knew we were on borrowed time, however.

This week I received a nicely-worded email from them indicating that it was time for us to upgrade to a paid plan, or transition to a different provider. After reviewing the paid options, we decided to find someone else to host our project. We have very modest requirements, and the offerings from Assembla were somewhat more than we needed.

Apart from that, we have no complaints about Assembla – they’re awesome, and if one of their plans fits your needs, I say go for it.

However, for our little project, RiouxSVN was looking like a better fit. I decided to give them a try.

How much?

For no cost, you get 50 MB of storage for up to 4 repositories. Well, we had one repository, but it was (according to Assembla) 75 MB in size. RiouxSVN gives you the tools to upgrade various aspects of your account, through redemption of credits. What is a credit? It’s what you get if you donate to RiouxSVN (via PayPal). $1 gets you 1 credit.

If you want 20 MB of additional storage, that uses 1 credit. Want another repository slot? That’s 2 credits. If you delete a repository, you get back the credits used to augment it, allowing you to re-allocate them. Nice.

I used 4 credits to pump up the available storage to 130 MB. That’s permanent – it’s one-time, not an annual donation. That’s nice.

Migration

OK, so the next step is to migrate our repository from Assembla to RiouxSVN.

After some research, I determined that the best option for us was a two-step process: to export to a local dump file, and then import the dump file. As a long-time, but not very deep TortoiseSVN user, I needed to install the latest command-line tools for the export/import task. I selected SlikSVN for this purpose.

The export, using svnrdump, is simple:

cd c:\temp
mkdir svn_dump
cd svn_dump
svnrdump dump https://subversion.assembla.com/svn/MyProject/trunk > MyProject.svn_dump
* Dumped revision 0.
* Dumped revision 1.
* Dumped revision 2.
:

After about 2-3 minutes, I had a 105 MB dump file.

Importing was basically the same process, only this time I was prompted for my RiouxSVN account credentials:

svnrdump load https://svn.riouxsvn.com/MyProject < MyProject.svn_dump
Authentication realm: <https://svn.riouxsvn.com:443> RiouxSVN
Username: xxxxxx
Password for 'xxxxxx': ************
* Loaded revision 0.
* Loaded revision 1.
* Loaded revision 2.
:

This took longer, a couple of seconds per revision. After about 10 minutes, it was completed. And I verified I could check out, check in, and commit a simple change to the new repository.