This guide discovered on Jeremy Whitlock's website www.thoughtspark.org/node/10 and rewritten here as a personal crib sheet.
#Create your local repository on your destination server
svnadmin create /usr/local/newrepo

#Create an empty pre-revprop-change hook script and make it executable
echo '#/bin/sh' > /usr/local/newrepo/hooks/pre-revprop-change
chmod u+x /usr/local/newrepo/hooks/pre-revprop-change

#Initialise svnsync
svnsync init file:///usr/local/newrepo svn://chrisnewland.com/oldrepo

#Sync with the server (as often as you like - initial sync will take a long time)
svnsync sync file:///usr/local/newrepo