[Motorola Photon Q 4G LTE] DRH48:
Somehow my phone is bricked, although I still am not sure if it's because I actually did something wrong or it just decided to brick itself out of spite. Here's the rundown of events:

This past August I rooted my phone and installed cm-10.2. I made a backup of the stock rom beforehand (which for some reason is dated from 1970). Since then there have been a bunch of bugs, but nothing super major.

Today I decided to upgrade to cm-11, so I backed up everything important to my PC and used the auto-updater. I got a Status 7 error and the installation didn't complete, and I got stuck in a reboot loop that kept returning me only to the bootloader. I read on another forum that the problem was probably my CWM version (6.0.1.2 instead of 6.0.1.3). Anyway, I tried restoring one of my backups, but the bootloader said the folder was empty and no backups were found. I ended up reinstalling cm-10.2 and gapps from the same zip files I used months ago. This let me properly boot up my phone, but for some reason the google play store still wasn't working. I did a simple reboot and it started working again, so I downloaded rom manager and updated cwm. Rebooted into bootloader, made another rom backup, and tried again to install cm-11. Same error, install aborted. This time, however, my backups magically reappeared (along with an extra mystery backup that had today's timestamp but was ~10 hours in the future), so I restored the original (1970, stock rom). Things boot up fine.

I decide to try installing cm-11 one more time because at this point I assume that if it fails again I can safely restore a backup or at the very least reinstall cm-10.2. It fails again, but this time, when I try restoring any of my cm-10.2 backups I get a DM5 mismatch error and it immediately stops. Restoring 1970 is different, it starts recovering but then halfway through says "error restoring /system" or something like that. So now I'm left with no choice but to reinstall cm-10.2 from the same zip file again. Only this time, booting up only shows the cyanogenmod logo forever. I go back into bootloader and my backups are once again suddenly not recognized. I make a new backup of my broken phone to see if it will make the folder show up. I reboot, and now that new backup is the only one that does show up. Trying to restore gives me a DM5 error. I've now tried reinstalling cm-10.2 several times, but my phone will never get past the cyanogenmod logo. I'm out of ideas for how to get my phone to work.

My questions:

1. Any idea how to unbrick my phone? I have not done any factory resetting because I was worried it would erase my backups and also I don't really see how it would help.

2. Does anyone have a backup image I could use? I don't have mine stored anywhere but on my phone's internal SD, but I could maybe try loading one from my external SD if I had one.

3. What did I do wrong here? From my viewpoint it seems I basically tried the same thing twice and got different results. Is there something I'm missing?

4. If I get a new photon q, how the hell should I go about installing cm-11? I know people have gotten it to work before. Which version are you using?

Thanks for any and all help