Having problems with restoring my iphone 4 to iphone 4s

Hi everyone, I have been having a nightmare with backup and restoring my from my iphone 4 to iphone 4s since Friday night.

Naturally, I got home with my new Iphone 4s and wanted to get it up and running with my current contacts, sms and notes (and apss, etc) off my iphone 4.

I upgraded itunes to 10.5 plugged in my iphone 4 and did a backup and sync to my PC.

Once this completed, I plugged in my iphone 4s and did a restore from a previous backup and selected the iphone 4 recent backup.

This went through the usual process for 30 mins to an hour and then errored out, saying that it cannot complete the restore because....wait for it...the backup maybe corrupt or I am restoring to an incompatible device, something along those lines. I have tried various things and various backups and restoring the iphone back to factory settings. I think on the most recent back up, I got the backup error (-50) which I have naturally gone through all the Apple forums and looked at the resolves for that but it says it is USB and timeout related, but it is not that as I have manged to restore from a backup from April this year and that works perfect.

I know what you are thinking, why not plug your iphone 4 back in and do another back up and then try and do a restore again to the iphone 4s. I would if I could but icloud has turned out to be my enemy in this case. When I was at work and I got my new iphone 4s, I set it up at work as a new phone to see how Siri works and the icloud. Obviously, it asks you to sign in with an apple account before you can go any further into using the phone for the first time. I did this and eventually got the phone on to look at the features. The phone had the new ios5 and I played around with it for a bit. Now when I got home and did the backup of the iphone 4, I connect and disconnect different phones and itunes likes to sync your phone as soon as I plug it in. Now with the combination of icloud backing up the new iphone 4s which is blank and then the new itunes has icloud funtionality, when I replugged the iphone 4 in, it synced with icloud and gave me the new iphone 4s settings which are blank!!!! I then had a blank iphone 4 and a blank iphone 4s, by blank I mean no contacts, sms, notes, etc and everytime I try to do a restore it give me the above errors.

I have since set itunes to back up to the PC, turned off icloud and played around with different restores, It is now Sunday and I have not got my phone back to its more recent settings (Been on it for 3 days!!)

I was wondering if anyone knows what file my contacts, sms, notes is stored in and can I import just that file into my new iphone? As for apps, music, etc, I can always sync them up afterwards using itunes. My main concern is my contacts, sms and notes; email accounts would be useful to restore aswell as I had about 8-10 email accounts in there too (work, personal, domains I own, in case you're wondering).

I have worked in IT for many years and have put all my skills to the test but nothing gets my recent files back. Is there anyone who knows a bit about the programming side of iphone backup files, although any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

For now I will probably revert back to an April backup until someone can help.

Many thank in advance.