Since Subversion 1.4 you can synchronize repositories easily. This way you can have a local copy which works when you’re offline. Great to keep a copy of your code + history on your laptop. The only thing to watch out for is that you can only synchronize it one-way, so don’t commit anything. Here’s how to do it on Windows:

To save some typing:
set FROM=http://yourserver/svn/repo
set TO=file:///d:/svn/repo

Create a local repository:
svnadmin create %TO%

Svnsync creates properties in the target respository’s revision 0 to track the sync status. To make this work you need to have a rev-prop-change hook (at least an empty one):

echo. > d:\svn\repo\hooks\pre-revprop-change.bat

Call svnsync init to create the properties:

svnsync init %TO% %FROM% --username <USER>

To look at the property we just created type:
svn proplist --verbose --revprop -r 0 %TO%

Not versioned property in Revision 0:
svn:sync-from-uuid : 94eeecdd-d4ee-0310-9089-7d9f06c0e571
svn:sync-last-merged-rev : 165
svn:date : 2005-01-29T18:22:33.902123Z
svn:sync-from-url : http://yourserver/svn/repo

To finally start synchronization call svnsync:

svnsync --non-interactive sync %TO%

If anything goes wrong the target repository may get locked if you call svnsync the next time. You’ll see an error message like this:

Failed to get lock on destination repos, currently held by 'xxxxxx'

To get rid of the lock you can delete the sync-lock property in revision 0:

svn propdel svn:sync-lock --revprop -r 0 %TO%

Now you could also create a post-commit hook which starts a sync everytime something gets commited (or just create a script to run via cron).