How can I prevent Tortoise SVN from doing an automatic merge?

My project contains a number of SSIS and S开发者_如何学编程SAS files, if a conflict occurs and Tortoise SVN silently merges the file it becomes corrupt. We are making heavy use of branching and when a file is merged it can quite easily go unnoticed.

How can I prevent this from occurring for certain files?

Subversion only merges files that have either no svn:mime-type set, or one set that's text/*. If you set the Subversion property to for example application/octet-stream it'll treat it as a binary file, and not auto merge. This means that you're more likely to get conflicts, ie all cases where it would normally auto merge are now conflicts you have to manually resolve.

Switching SVN to think the file is a binary file will stop SVN from trying to merge it.

The question How do I tell Subversion to treat a file as a binary file? deals with how to set the properties.