Well it was "a" production database, the one that tracks supplier orders and invoices so that suppliers can eventually get paid. The database is populated by a data stream, so after restoration of the old version, they replayed the data stream (that is indeed stored somewhere, but in only one version (not a backup)).

And this was far from painless: the system was unavailable for a whole day, and all manual interventions on the system (like comments, corrections, etc.) that had been done between the restoration date and the incident, were irretrievably lost. -- There were not too many of those apparently, but still.