Svn – Is it possible to keep two SVN servers synchronized with each commit and both with read/write rights

I have almost the same setup and to make this work for all the application developers I used the following permissions

drwxr-xr-x 7 www-data www-data

my www-data user/group = your apache user/group

I also added the applications developers to the group www-data.

By the way, this is in my apache conf file (this keeps things more secure):

  <Location /somesite>
     DAV svn
     SVNParentPath /home/www/svn/somesite
     SVNListParentPath On
     AuthType Basic
     AuthName "Subversion Repository"
     AuthUserFile /home/www/svn/.htpasswd
     <Limit GET PROPFIND OPTIONS REPORT>
        Require valid-user               
     </Limit>
  </Location>

Test first that you can commit locally on your server and then remotely.

You need to make sure that the repository is not changed at all (i.e. new check-ins) while the backup is taking place. This can be arranged a number of ways but probably the easiest is to use hotcopy to make a new copy of the repository (the process respects subversions versioning/locking system so you get a consistent point-in-time copy of the repository even if people are actively using it) then backing that copy up to the remote site using rsync.

rsync supports syncing full directory structures, and if the remote end is contactable via SSH (or similar) you don't need to be running the rsync in daemon mode (it just needs to be installed so it can be called via ssh).

The rsync command you need is probably of the form:

rsync -a /path/to/hotcopy/copy user@remote.host:/path/to/backup/location

This connects to remote.host via SSH as user, starts an rsync process, and arranges the transfer with it then closes it before closing the SSH session. The -a option (short for --archive) includes a lot of options including the one that causes rsync to operate recursively over a whole directory structure. You might want to add the --compress option too as no doubt your repository's contents will compress well saving you some bandwidth. See the rsync man page for more details.