Looking for restoration tips.

I am having a problem restoring most of my full backups.
3 of 4 restorations bombed out with an error like "missing cpanel user file"

I created the account and tried in cpanel to restore there rather than whm and it did create a directory with all the backup files in it but for some reason file manager will not copy the public_html folder inside the backup and replace the empty one so that at least the website was up and running again. The one i'm struggling with most is fairly large.

I saw a few posts about adjusting memory settings or cpanel versions but no details.
Any other tips or tricks or backend manipulations to get this to work would be great.