I am using svnadmin hotcopy --incremental to create daily backups of a subversion repository. The size of the hotcopy initially was approximately the same size as the repository (which I would expect). However, with each increment, the size grows by more or less 10% of the original size. Fortunately this is a virtual machine so that I can expand the destination disk, but I'd much rather find out what I'm doing wrong.
The hotcopy runs unattended, but I'm crating logs from which I can say that the hotcopy only processes only new revisions (so it is not the same problem as in Does svn hotcopy overwrite existing files?). The repo uses the FSFS file system. It is currently 109 GB large, and today the hotcopy has exceeded 200 GB.
The svn server is TortoiseSVN 1.12.28653, running under MS Windows Server 2019. These are not the latest versions, and if this is a known problem that was fixed in a more recent version, I will recommend to upgrade.
Thank you for any hints!
Problem solved. We have a 3rd party add-on which creates indexing information and stores it in temporary files in the "index" subfolder of the repository. svnadmin hotcopy obviously just copies the directory tree with everything in it, and thus also copies the "index" folder although not part of the repository. As a solution, I'm trying to move the temporary "index" folder to a different location (and if that doesn't work, I'm going to delete it from the hotcopy).