Periodically, you should ensure that changes done by others get
incorporated in your local working copy. The process of
getting changes from the server to your local copy is
known as updating. Updating may be done on
single files, a set of selected files, or recursively on
entire directory hierarchies. To update, select the files
and/or directories you want, right click and select
→
in the explorer context menu. A window will pop up displaying the
progress of the update as it runs.
Changes done by others will be merged into your files,
keeping any changes you may have done to the same files.
The repository is not affected by an update.
The progress dialog uses colour coding to highlight different update actions
- Purple
New item added to your WC.
- Dark red
Redundant item deleted from your WC, or missing item replaced in your WC.
- Green
Changes from repository successfully merged with your local changes.
- Bright red
Changes from repository merged with local changes, resulting in conflicts which you need to resolve.
- Black
Unchanged item in your WC updated with newer version from the repository.
If you get any conflicts during an update (this
can happen if others changed the same lines in the same file as
you did and those changes don't match) then the dialog shows those
conflicts in red. You can double click on these lines
to start the external merge tool to resolve the conflicts.
TortoiseSVN also allows you to update your working copy to a specific
revision, not only to the most recent one. This command is called
→
and first opens a dialog where you can enter the required revision.
Say e.g. your working copy is at revision 100, but you want your
working copy to reflect the state which it had in revision 50 -
then simply update to revision 50.
In that dialog, you can also decide if you only want to update the
current folder only (without all the subfolders) and/or if you want to
ignore any external projects in the update
(i.e. projects referenced using svn:externals).
Caution
If you update a file or folder to a specific revision, you should not
make changes to those files. You will get out of date
error messages when you try to commit them!
If you want to undo changes to a file and start afresh from an earlier
revision, you should use one of the following commands instead. The
→
command from the log dialog will undo only those changes made in
the selected revision. Changes made after that revision will be retained.
For reverting multiple revisions, you should use the
→
menu command,
where you can specify the range of revisions you want to undo.
can occasionally be useful to see what your project looked like at some earlier point in its history. But in general, updating individual files to an earlier revision is not a good idea as it leaves your working copy in an inconsistent state. If the file you are updating has changed name, you may even find that the file just disappears from your working copy because no file of that name existed in the earlier revision. If you simply want a local copy of an old version of a file it is better to use the → command from the log dialog for that file.
Multiple Files/Folders
If you select multiple files and folders in the explorer and then select , all of those files/folders are updated one by one. TortoiseSVN makes sure that all files/folders which are from the same repository are updated to the exact same revision! Even if between those updates another commit occurred.
Local File Already Exists
Sometimes when you try to update, the update fails with a message to say that there is already a local file of the same name. This typically happens when Subversion tries to checkout a newly versioned file, and finds that an unversioned file of the same name already exists in your working folder. Subversion will never overwrite an unversioned file - it might contain something you are working on, which coincidentally has the same filename as another developer has used for his newly committed file.
If you get this error message, the solution is simply to rename the local unversioned file. After completing the update, you can check whether the renamed file is still needed.
If you keep getting error messages, use → instead to list all the problem files. That way you can deal with them all at once.