Reading one svndiff window read beyond the end of the representation

I tried svn update and got the following error:

Reading one svndiff window read beyond the end of the representation

This is usually caused by an error in the repository. The moment the message popped up I knew the exact cause of the error as well. My repository is older than my working copy. You will say that is always so. Well in this case, this particular working copy is at revision 187 while the repository only has 185 revisions in it!

How come? Well I lost a hard drive and lost this particular repository. I had lost another repo as well and went through the annoying process of restoring it using working copies. But I had forgotten to restore this particular repo. In the end it turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

The repo contains my mails. I read and reply to mails on both my macbook and my desktop and download them onto both machines as well. The mail servers use IMAP (can't figure out why people would want to use POP3). I keep the macbook and the desktop in sync by using svn commits and updates. Unfotunately if you download into the same folder you get conflicts and because some folders contain thousands of mails the conflicts are very hard to resolve.

In the end though, I had no choice but to resolve those conflicts. The thunderbird 'delete duplicates' extension was a life saver.