Reduce Subversion pristine copy
Subversion VCS store copy of each file pristine directory placed in own hidden .svn directory. Storing copy for each file means that working copy takes twice as much size as stored files. This may not be problem for small repository but if you want to store for example 30GB of photos in repository and want to checkout working copy on machine with 60 GB drive then you have problem.
Possible methods of reducing pristine size
Subversion client built-in mechanism
The feature could be implemented directly to the client in some later 1.8+ version.
There is already opened Issue 525 named "allow working copies without text-base/". But the authors want to stay with original subversion principle that storage is cheap and network is slow so they want to keep copy of files.
File deduplication of working copy
It could possibly work on filesystem level with existing filesystems or as virtual filesystem.
One example could be Scord which solve this for versions <= 1.6 on Linux platform
Make pristine files zero size by helper program
It maybe possible to temporary make pristine file empty and update their content manually by invoking come helper program. Such program could check svn status and download correct content of modified files from repository to be able to commit them. Set zero size to other pristine files. Such program should be able to work with svn sqlite database to read file name to pristine name relation. Also it should be multi-platform.
#!/bin/bash
for F in $(find ./.svn/pristine -type f -size +0);
do
cat /dev/null >$F
done
If pristine files are set to empty then all svn operation could be used except these related to file content as svn diff or svn commit of modified files. To be able also work with file diff, pristine file content should be restored from repository somehow.