is there a way via stsadm or anything that will allow to restore docs to a different location? i have a user who wants to keep the current item but view the deleted item without overwriting?i'm working with wss3.0

It's going to depend on your backup. If you did a site collection backup with STSADM (using the -URL parameter instead of the -BACKUPMETHOD parameter; BACKUPMETHOD does a full farm backup, the smallest it can get is a content database), you can restore the full site collection to a different URL and access the document within the restored site collection. But with STSADM, a site collection is the smallest unit you can get to within a site via backup. STSADM's Export operation allows you to target a web (or subsite) within a site collection but no smaller than that, and its not going to capture as much data about the site as the Backup operation will.SQL Backups are similiar in nature, although you'd have to restore them to a different farm in order to access their content.There are some free third party tools that specifically allow item-level backup and restore, there's definitely one from AvePoint and I think there is one from Quest as well. Most of the third-party backup/restore tools also allow this as part of their greater feature set, but they require a purchase beyond that of the cost of SharePoint.Unfortunately SharePoint's out of the box backup and restore options leave a lot to be desired in the area of granularity of protection. JohnMCTS: WSS v3, MOSS 2007, and SCOM 2007 Now Available on Amazon - The SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Guide.