Once on iCloud how do you recover lost address book data?

After moving to iCloud my wife suddenely lost all her contact info earlier today.  When opening Address Book on her iMac & iPad all contact info was gone.  We signed on to iCloud.com and it was gone there too.  For some reason it was still on her iPhone.  I tried to force a merge from her phone by shutting off iCloud Contacts; selecting to keep data on the device; then turned it back on hoping to get the 'merge data' option.  I didn't get that message and sure enough in a few seconds the address book on her phone went empty.
So, this raised the question about where do I recover the data from?  I looked in finder on her iMac under user/Library/Addplication Support/Address Book - there were some files and directories there, but nothing that looked like it was loaded with contact info. I'm assumming once she moved to iCloud the detail is no longer stored locally in OS X?
I went into System Prefs and shut off iCloud Contacts on the iMac, opened Time Machine, went back a week ago (prior to iCloud) and found contact info in the user/Library/Addplication Support/Address Book directory and restored the entire directory.  Opened Address Book and it was populated with data.  turned on iCloud Contacts and selected the 'Merge' data option which then populated her other devices.
So, the question is - what if it had been longer than a week - where is this data (and probably calendar data too!) being backed up and where (and how) would you restore it from if it did suddenly turn up missing?

RickTexas wrote:
So this gets back to my original question... not sure if bgbrobru is running Time Machine backups, but even if he is, I don't think the Address Book data is recoverable (unless you go back to a pre-iCloud backup) because it is no longer stored locally.
If I understand correctly the only thing we can do going forward is to run a periodic 'manual' export of iCal and Address Book data to insure we have a backup?  In the event I do something stupid and mistakingly delete something or - like what happened to my wife today - the entire address book (or calendar entries) just disapear, we are screwed?  I guess this would also apply to email stored in folders on iCloud?
Seems there should be some way to capture the iCloud data in a Time Machine (or some other mechanism) backup?
Sorry Rick but that's incorrect,
Here's a shot of the folder it lives in and the path to it, Time Machine backs it up.

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