Nico Mommaerts wrote me about his subversion experience, in response to my subversion troubles. He had data corruption problems too, they disappeared after he switched the file system type under the repository from berkeley db to fsfs.

Apparently, the subversion team feels the same – the default file system type for svnadmin create is now (version 1.20) fsfs instead of bdb (in a version 1.14 I had on another box). If you want to find out the file system type of a repository, there is a file called ‘fstype’ in the db directory of your repository that tells you.