I changed length/values and data disappeared

[cosmic_bird]

Using PHPMyAdimin I made some changes.
Basically a field called 'comments' wasn't showing all the data on awebpage. It was set to varchar but with no length/values set.
So I put in length/values of 1000 however no extra text was showing up on the webpage.

Then I changed length/values to a value of 5 just to see if it was taking effect on the webpage, it was, only 5 characters showed up.

Now when I changed the value back to a higher number it still only shows 5 characters on the webpage BUT more worrying within the database I can only see 5 characters, the rest of the data in the 'comments' field has disappeared. This doesn't make sense, it's as if the text in the field has been deleted from the database.

How can I restore everything the way it was before I change the value to 5?

[r937]

How can I restore everything the way it was before I change the value to 5?

did you make a backup of the table data before changing the table?

if not, the data is gone