[XDA Assist] disturpants:
Hi guys, wasn't sure where to post this and I've been searching the web for hours without coming up with an answer with the best way to fix the problem I've got.

So yesterday my sister gave me her phone saying it was shat and slow and generally rubbish (S4 i9505 running 4.4.2). So I had a brief look at it and she had absolutely no room on the phone at all, it was completely clogged. So I deleted all the cache data (4 gigs!!), as soon as I did this the phone came back to life and started updating everything it could, then made a backup in CWM. Thought while I'm here I may as well put the official Lollipop firmware on it from Sammobile. All was good until I realised that she has never backed anything up to google or any other cloud storage (pretty dumb!) and all of her important stuff I couldn't get back.

So I then had to try and extract some data from the CWM backup... couldn't do it. I just couldn't find the files that she wanted restored. Mainly whatsapp messages and pictures and also Smemo. These are all she needs, there's really important memos apparently, why the hell she never backed them up or had another copy of them is beyond me if they were that important!

So I tried restoring just the data part of the 4.4 CWM restore to the 5.0 rom, looking back now I see this is where I went wrong and was asking for trouble.

So I then tried rolling back to the full CWM backup, all went well so I assumed and it said it was successful. This was until the phone booted. Constant spamming of gapps has stopped working, and no matter what I did I couldn't get it to stop, the phone was unusable with it constantly pinging up, every app was failing, and then it would turn itself off and reboot.

So I Factory reset again and wiped everything, installed the backup again, same thing happened again. Even tried flashing the latest version of gapps, but nothing had any effect.

So now I'm thinking oh feck... I didn't make a backup of the Lollipop install as I thought the rollback would have just cured it, and she had already started messing about with it, making it look pretty and getting people to send her some of the important files she had.

So I thought balls, tough luck and you'll have to start again, your fault for never backing anything up. So I reflashed Lollipop, and for some reason it wouldn't boot. Would just hang at the Samsung logo, this was 4am, I was panicking as I'd effectively bricked her phone. So after lots of boot loops and countless flashes I was looking on ebay for a new phone for her, then suddenly it finally boots on one of the flashes.

Anyway after a lot of faffing about, flashing 4.4 which worked, so flashed 5.0 again, and luckily it booted, I don't know what happened, maybe I missed something as I was so tired, so I signed her into google and let all the apps download while I slept.

Now the question is, I seem to have found a site that explains how to extract individual files vaguely, I just need to get the smemos and whatsapp files and I'm not entirely sure where to look and extract these files. Also, will they corrupt if I try to install them on the 5.0 firmware?

Any help would be much appreciated as I'm really in the stinky brown stuff.