Moving from Assembla to… a USB drive

My new SVN repository

So a couple weeks ago or so I got an email from Assembla saying that they were getting rid of their free and private SVN hosting. I really enjoyed their service, and all of it’s benefits. I haven’t seen a product so well put together that can compare. But their new pricing model is bad.

I am working on a project that at most has had two developers with one ‘space’. Their pricing model would say that it is about $7 per month ($2 per person per space and $3 per gigabyte). I currently pay just under $5 per month for hosting for my web projects. This means that it would more than double the costs I am paying for projects that don’t generate any revenue.

The suggested alternative? Make it a free public SVN. I am all for open-source, and I have contributed to OSS before, but sometimes I am working on projects where I want to retain my intellectual property.

Since the projects have been primarily myself working on them, I’ve resorted to a different location for my SVN hosting. I’m using my 2gb flash drive. Hopefully it will be plenty for my projects, and I can always just copy the SVN to another drive if it ever becomes necessary.

All of this was really easy to accomplish actually. I used TortoiseSVN to create a new repository on the USB drive. Checked out the contents. Removed all the .svn folders from the Assembla checkout and copied them to the new location on my hard drive. Did an Add, Commit, and now I am back to a subversion system. 

I’ve lost my old changesets, which sucks, but right now it just seems like a casualty.

If you want more information on how I did this, there’s great step-by-step instructions on Ken Robertson’s blog.