Wait! Should svn sync be run before update operations, not after? Otherwise changes will be lost during the update and there won't be anything to sync.
No, because that's not how svn works. (I keep saying that to various questions, and I'm not trying to be a jerk, honest)
A working copy contains metadata about the versioned files therein. One of these metadata items is the revision that each file is "pegged" to. When I make edits to a file, the contents of that file are changed, but the pegRevision remains the same.
When we do an svn update, we query the repo for the latest revision. If the repo revision is the same as the local revision, nothing happens - even though the working copy file is different from the file on the repo. When we alternately do a status query (which is entirely local), we see (from checksum metadata) that the working copy is modified from the "pristine" repo version. This is how we know when a file's status is "modified."
The magic happens when the repo revision is higher than the working copy revision - the repo file is merged into the working copy file, maintaining any local differences while adding differences from the repo. If it couldn't merge due to conflicts, it will let you know and do some other stuff that I won't get in to. It's up to you at that point to manually resolve the conflict.
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Anyway, long story short: syncing after update is fine. In fact it saves some redundant operations if the repo contains a higher revision - we merge, push local updates, and then sync, finding that the local file matches so we don't need to do further I/O. Doing sync beforehand adds an unnecessary push step.