As mentioned before, the .svn directory also holds the pristine “text-base” versions of files. You can find those in .svn/text-base. The benefits of these pristine copies are multiple—network-free checks for local modifications and difference reporting, network-free reversion of modified or missing files, more efficient transmission of changes to the server—but they come at the cost of having each versioned file stored at least twice on disk. These days, this seems to be a negligible penalty for most files. However, the situation gets uglier as the size of your versioned files grows. Some attention is being given to making the presence of the text-base an option. Ironically, though, it is as your versioned files’ sizes get larger that the existence of the “text-base” becomes more crucial—who wants to transmit a huge file across a network just because he wants to commit a tiny change to it?

Similar in purpose to the “text-base” files are the property files and their pristine “prop-base” copies, located in .svn/props and .svn/prop-base, respectively. Since directories can have properties too, there are also .svn/dir-props and .svn/dir-prop-base files.