In both CVS and Svn you can just check out from a local directory. For a couple years I used CVS for my private local repos where CVSROOT was sth. like /my/cvsroot. Same is possible with Svn too.
The SVN documentation (used to) warn that concurrent access in this configuration could lead to data loss. Even though I'm the only human who accessed my repository I did use scripts, so I always avoided this setup because of that.
