I had this happen after having Tortoise get corrupted and crash while trying to update folders. I ended up re-installing Tortoise, but the ghost lock was still present. From there I had to delete the folder and do a new checkout. Obviously I got really lucky that I didn't have any new changes to commit at the time. Anyhow, not great news, and if anyone has a better solution I'd love to hear it myself. Even using "Break Lock" ie unlock with the force option did not change anything.
Right click on your Subversion working directory folder, and select TortoiseSVN->Clean Up from the Context Menu. This will recurse it's way through your working directory and cleanup any incomplete actions, remove the local locks (which is different from using Subversion locking of a file in the repository which lets everyone know about the lock).
If that doesn't work, see if you can find the names of the files that were changed, but not yet committed, save them, and redo the checkout.
If the file was locked by yourself(same svn account), you can follow these steps:
Right click on the locked file or folder, and select TortoiseSVN->Get lock... , and check on "[] Steal the locks" at the bottom left corner of the dialog, click "OK". If it complete successfully, that's ok. When you right click on the file again, you can see TortoiseSVN->Release lock..., click to unlock.
To anyone still having this issue (Error: Working copy '{DIR}' locked.), I have your solution:
I found that when one of TortoiseSVN windows crash, it leaves a TSVNCache.exe that still has a few handles to your working copy and that is causing the Lock issues you are seeing (and also prevents Clean Up from doing it's job).
So to resolve this:
Either
1a) Use Process Explorer or similar to delete the handles owned by TSVNCache.exe
1b) ..Or even easier, just use Task Manager to kill TSVNCache.exe
Then
2) Right click -> TortoiseSVN -> Clean up. Only "Clean up working copy status" needs to be checked.
From there, happy updating/committing. You can reproduce Lock behavior by doing SVN Update and then quickly killing it's TortoiseProc.exe process before Update finishes.
SVN needs to update the parent directory with the deleted folders info.
You have to do it from the common root of the source and destination folders or use full paths.
In addition to David M's answer, while doing cleanup -> check 'break locks' option. This will ensure release of locks. Then do svn update. This worked for me.
I had this problem where I couldn't unlock a file from the client side. I decided to go to the sever side which was much simpler.
On SVN Server:
Locate locks
svnadmin lslocks /root/of/repo
(in my case it was var/www/svn/[name of Company])
You can add a specific path to this by svnadmin lslocks /root/of/repo "path/to/file"
I encountered similar issue, it told me that some files has been locked by xx. However, xx said he has release lock and he cannot find the lock on TortoiseSVN.
clean up doesn't work for me. I have to ask he go to TortoiseSVN -> Repo-browser, find the corresponding files, then right click these files and choose break lock.