Help Need advice on serious restore problems

[Mechphisto]

Hoping someone can give me some advice...
It all started NOT with my trying to play around with roms or root or anything, but because my Contacts inexplicably began crashing every time I accessed them. So in the course of trying to fix that, I followed some suggestions regarding factory reset and restoring.

1. I installed the ATRIX 2 bootstrap/cwm, and backed up the rom with CWM. Then cleared the caches and did a reset. Then re-rooted, reinstalled cwm, and did a full restore. Everything came back just fine, no problems...but the contacts issue persisted. So, feeling positive about that, I went on to try the next suggestion of just reinstalling the apps and not the data...

2. It was days later, so I did another cwm backup. I also did a complete Titanium app+data backup. Did the exact same steps to clear and reset. But this time, I went in and re-rooted and reinstalled Titanium and attempted a restore from that.

Oddly, it showed I had half of the apps that I had previously backed up!
But, I did a restore anyway.

From that point, Bad Things! I constantly got errors that "tasks" has shut down. The home button stopped responding.

So, I finally managed to reinstall the bootstrap/cwm and got back into cwm recovery and tried to fix permissions. No change.

3. I did the whole clear caches and factory restore yet again. And this time I tried to do a complete cwm restore like I did the very first time and simply put it back to the way it was, but with the broken Contacts.

However, during the restore process, cwm stopped and stated there was an error restoring the system. No more details than that. I simply rebooted, and the phone's just at the new factory reset state.

I'm at a loss of what to do! Is the cwm backup corrupted??
Is there a way to get Titanium to restore properly?

I'm hoping for some experienced gurus to give a suggestion I don't have the experience to think of nor can seem to find by searching for this particular problem. Worst case scenario, I guess, I can just reinstall everything one-by-one from scratch. (Say, is there a way to get the Google Play store to simply install everything I had downloaded previously?)

Thanks for any assistance!
Liam

 

[Mechphisto]

Wait a second... it appears as though somehow everything on the SD card got corrupted. All the files are technically there, but none of them will open. Which explains why both Titanium and cwm backups error-out.
What could have happened to cause this, that didn't happen the very first successful backup and recovery?

 

[Mechphisto]

Hmm, I may have found a clue.
Back in the Before Time, I had encryption enabled on the SD card. Now after the restores, the encryption setting is turned off. Presumably, all those files I can see on the SD card are simply still encrypted.

Question: If I turn encryption back on, would that possibly unencrypt all those files? Or were they encrypted with a seed (or whatever the term is) that's now long gone and they're forever unrecoverable?

I know the easy way to find out it to simply just turn encryption on. But I'm hoping to get advice from experienced people before I do more than could ruin the progress I've made reinstalling stuff.

(I'm still curious: The very first time I reset and restored and it worked fine, I had encryption on.... so, why then after the factory reset that time, did the cwm backup not corrupt due to the lost encryption? Assuming this is the root issue.)