About a month back, the (rather old) machine (SuSE, believed to be openSuSE 9.1) storing our subversion repositories experienced critical hard drive failure. We had a backup, no more than a couple of days old, of the state of the repository directories, but as I've finally managed to get the time to rebuild the system, I'm now wondering about how to properly restore them.

I'm activating subversion on an openSuSE 11.3 machine, trying to set up the system so it resembles our old one as closely as possible. However, I've seen notes to the effect of "don't change anything in these directories" while looking at the last gasp of the old server, which is leaving me nervous.

All we did to create that backup was simply copy the contents of the original repository directory off elsewhere. Once I get the new repository system set up, is it safe to simply dump that backup into place, exactly as it was on the old machine? Or will doing that cause a problem with the new setup? And if the latter, what's the best way to restore those backed-up files?

You should be ok with a backup (such as tar) provided the source files weren't being changed during the backup; then just transplant that into your new SVN installation.