TortoiseSVN: copy contents of one branch over another

I'm using TortoiseSVN without an external Subversion server to manage LabView source (i.e. a large collection of ever-changing binary files).

I'd like to have a "beta" branch of the repository that anyone can subscribe to and get daily updates. I guess this is different from a usual beta release series with separate branches, but it's right for this project.

What is the best/easiest way to copy the contents of a particular revision of the trunk branch over to the beta branch? Essentially what I want to do is delete the old contents of beta and insert new contents. Delete+add would work, I suppose, but it's clearly suboptimal. Merge is not an option unless I can get Tortoise to automatically resolve all conflicts in the trunk's favor, including deleting files.

Update: a couple people have asked why I don't want delete+add. I'd like a cleaner alternative.

1. This method leads to half the updates to the beta tree being "wipe out last rev."
2. The updates are not atomic so someone could pick up an empty release.
3. I haven't tried and seen, but beta wouldn't be a proper branch. Would the revision log even track multiple revisions at all, since it's a "new" file each time?

Update 2: svn allows any arbit开发者_StackOverflowrary commands before a commit, but I couldn't get Tortoise to work this way. After selecting "Delete," stub directories were still left over until I committed, at which point I could repopulate the branch. There needs to be a way to unmark a directory for deletion when it exists in both the old and new tag revisions.

Merge is not an option unless I can get Tortoise to automatically resolve all conflicts in the trunk's favor, including deleting files.

I don't know about TortoiseSVN, but if you install the command line client you could do the following to merge the latest trunk changes to a beta branch:

cd c:/path/to/my/working/copy/of/beta/branch
svn merge file:///c:/path/to/my/repository/trunk --accept theirs-full
svn commit -m "merged latest trunk changes to beta branch"

The --accept theirs-full option resolves all conflicts by using the trunk's version like you want.

This has some advantages: subversion will do representation sharing, so files stored on both branches will not take extra space in the repository. Also, when users update their beta working copy, only the files that were changed need to be pulled over the wire.

SVN is transactional - a delete and copy (not add!) would not be problematic. And beta would be a proper branch (or better a tag)

Why not delete beta/* and then copy trunk/* to beta/ ?