SVN Checkout Fails or Hangs: a Workaround

svn co http://www.mysite

Was giving me errors like

jeremy:.. jeremy$ svn up
svn: Working copy '.' locked
svn: run 'svn cleanup' to remove locks (type 'svn help cleanup' for details)
jeremy:... jeremy$
jeremy:... jeremy$ svn cleanup
svn: In directory 'sites/all/modules/contrib/emfield/contrib/emthumb'
svn: Error processing command 'modify-wcprop' in
'sites/all/modules/contrib/emfield/contrib/emthumb'
svn: 'sites/all/modules/contrib/emfield/contrib/emthumb/CHANGELOG.txt'
is not under version control
jeremy:.. jeremy$


It seemed the that SVN repository (hosted on an external server) was
timing out or something and would fail halfway through the checkout.

So I was able just rsync the file to my machine (tarring and then scp or
rsync failed due to timeouts).

rsync -avz -e ssh youruser@yoursite:/var/www/vhosts/yoursite/trunk
./yoursite

But then svn switch was giving me errors like

jeremy:... jeremy$ svn switch https://myrepo.com
svn: 'file:///repo_hosted_on_server'
is not the same repository as
'https://myrepo.com'
So this was the solution:
svn switch --relocate repo_hosted_on_server
https://myrepo.com