Brunning's 1st Law of Source Control: He who checks in first, merges least.

"Source control ate my files!" is a superb post. Spot on - 9 times out of 10, when someone complains about Subversion (or whatever) screwing things up, it can be traced back to fear of updates or commits, or to someone blatting someone else's changes with a blind merge. This last, especially, can always be traced - there's no hiding the truth when history is an open book.

The other time, it's someone trying to revert a revision from a dirty working copy. I've never yet seen the software get it wrong.

But for the love of God, Darren, start running a continuous integration server already!