I don't know much about Tortoise SVN, but have been using it for a while :) I understand that it is capable of managing concurrent users on same file, but how does it do that? I am working on a file that another user is using concurrently and he committed couple of times before me, Now my files doesnt have the changes he made. Every time i end up in such a situation I gets a conflict and I am stuck.

So is there something else I should do instead of just committing and causing conflict.

Is it safe to do a update first and then commit ? Will I lose my local changes in this case?

Please dont beat me up if this is somthing basic, A link to some tutorial will be useful in that case :)