This section is from the "Version Control with Subversion" book, by Ben Collins-Sussman, Brian W. Fitzpatrick and C. Michael Pilato. Also available from Amazon: Version Control with Subversion.
Subversion doesn't track either the state or existence of working copies on the server, so there's no server overhead to keeping working copies around. Likewise, there's no need to let the server know that you're going to delete a working copy.
If you're likely to use a working copy again, there's nothing wrong with just leaving it on disk until you're ready to use it again, at which point all it takes is an svn update to bring it up to date and ready for use.
However, if you're definitely not going to use a working
copy again, you can safely delete the entire thing, but you'd
be well served to take a look through the working copy for
unversioned files. To find these files, run svn
status and review any files that are prefixed by a
?
to make certain that they're not of
importance. After you're done reviewing, you can safely
delete your working copy.