Trying to split a large SVN repo into one git repo.
 

The SVN repo in question is just under 1GB but it still takes forever to clone it from place to place. On top of that, several of us are sick of dealing with it and it's entirely our responsibility to manage. We came to the consensus that we'd use git, and the responsibility fell to me to transition the repository (since I was the person who argued most for git).

We also agreed that we'd split the repository into about 5 new repositories. This could easily be done in a lazy way just by copying directories and files into the new repositories, running git add . and going on our merry way. I'd like to preserve the history of everything though.

From what I can tell, there should be away to split the repositories into new SVN repos and then run git-svn from there. So the first question I have is this:
1) When I run 'svnadmin dump ./directory > svnrepo.directory.dump' svnadmin provides the error message:
"Can't open file 'directory/format': No such file or directory"
Which begs the question (having never used SVN myself and only being here for a couple weeks and thereby never having to use it) what the hell is the format file? I can't find one anywhere in the repository.
2) Is there a more intelligent way of doing this?
3) If there isn't, is this at least the correct way to resolve it once I resolve the missing 'format' file issue?

Thanks for your help and advice.

Btw, Googling around hasn't helped.

Solution
 

So combined with this and the knowledge that with one repository you can use [code]git svn clone[/clone] with sub-directories of the root svn repository (i.e. the directory structure is , etc.) this makes splitting the one respository into several smaller ones fantastically simple. Git does all the work really though.