newbie question

[Vim Visual]

Hi,

this is very funny... this week I started thinking that svn would be a
clever way to backup everything at /home/pau and I found this mailing list...

However, even if seemingly I had a good idea, because it's shared by
many people,
I seem not to know how to proceed. I have never used svn nor cvs but I skimmed
through the manual to learn how to do things and I am a bit puzzled...

I started writing a script for cron, so that it automatically svn
commits everything in /home/pau (which is also iron hand, like Joey
Hess'), so that I created a local mirror like

/home/pau/local_svn_mirror

and in it made a ln -s to all /home/pau/important_directory1,
/home/pau/important_directory2

and the idea was to svn commit /home/pau/local_svn_mirror to a repository in
another machine...
But then I ran into a snag... I am a newbie to svn and I think
that I have to tell svn which files have been created, deleted, etc...

                     svn add foo      - to add a new directory (foo),
                                        new files, links etc
                     svn delete foo   - instead of just "rm"
                     svn copy foo bar - instead of just "cp foo bar"
                     svn move foo bar - instead of just "mv foo bar"

When I realised of this then I understood it makes no sense to try to svn
commit everything... Then I googled and found the Hess' page but I didn't quite
understand some things... I've got the impression I am doing things in
the wrong way

So the question is... how do you tell svn which files/subdirectories have you
created in your local mirror without having to pass svn add, svn delete to
everything, which would be nonesense?

Cheers,

Pau