Restoring unpublished Contributor data?

[Hitman]

I am new to the contributor application, hence I would require some assistance from you guys as I have a situation….

One of my users loaded a data into a contributor application and accidentaly saved the same.
Now he wants to ignore the uploaded data & get the older version .

Is there a way that I can restore the data from the server backup or something like that? (The data is not published and hence its not there in the database tables)

Also it would be great if someone explains to me,
Where & how does the contributor store the data before publishing?   :-\

[ykud]

xml lobs in nodestate table.
each row of nodestate corresponds to an elist item, you can find you which one you need to restore via looking at develepoment_items table holding guid-name pairs.

[SomeClown]

Contributor has two databases (or schemas if you are Oracle).

One is the data of record, the application datastore.  This is the main item shown in the Admin Console.  This is where your user imported data.  This is the database to restore (careful if you have admin links, etc).

The second is the published data.  Think of this as a staging database - it stores data converted from the engine format (Blobs) into relational.  Published data is not data of record: you can recreate it by simply republishing the application.  It only exists when the user administrator wants to make data available to other applications (via ODBC, exports, etc)

Example:  Contributor app is   budget2007,   publish database is budget2007_table     budget2007 is the database that needs to be backed up and restored.