Data Missing after a Restore from a recent back up

Hello, I had a start up issue with only a grey screen and spinning wheel. After reading about this issue, and the strong possibility the HDD was failing, I followed the "Restore" procedure from the Disk utility(command R). After restoring things(although at first said it would be 3 hours and then completed in 30 min.), all looked normal but no pics, docs, phonebook entries, downloads, emails, etc. I have 3 users/accounts on same Mac and has been working fine for 3 years. My wife's stuff "all" seemed to come back like I expected. She has all her pics, emails, docs, etc However, mine acts like a complete new load. And of course my files are the most critical. When I try to use "Time Machine" for specific folders/data(pics, docs, etc.)with what I believe are good backups and no obvious errors, it starts up stating it's preparing the files for copy and then I get a message stating it can't complete the function(error 8003 I believe). Or the other message I get often is it can't copy or delete the files because they're in use by OS-X. I've tried using "a" data Recovery software, it appears the files are out there on my external drive with the Time machine backups, although I haven't attempted to restore with generic recovery software.

Any ideas would be appreciated as I thought things were pretty routine and felt I was in good shape with multiple backups but they don't appear to be totally restoring or I'm missing something. Thank you! jerry