In the first part of this chapter, we will take a look at some good practices to keep safety and work on actual SVN repository with no hassles. Bear in mind that the purpose of this chapter is only to give readers some hints; dealing with big and complex repositories deserves a more prudent and articulated approach.
To be able to do these experiments, you need a Subversion tool; on Windows, the most used tool is the well-known TortoiseSVN (available at http://tortoisesvn.net), which provides both command-line tools: GUI and shell integration.
I recommend to do a full installation of TortoiseSVN, including command-line tools as we'll need some of them to make experiments.