Need help restoring my Linux home directory to a previous state.

Hi. I'm having trouble using Back In Time and Duplicati. None of them are working for me. In Back In Time, I tried restoring my home directory to a backup from 2 days ago and it appears to have changed the permissions for all my configuration files. When I open Firefox, none of my bookmarks or addons are visible so apparently it can't access my profile. Syncthing doesn't work either. It says, "Syncthing daemon exits too fast". I have a Duplicati backup from 2 weeks ago but it crashed when I tried using it so maybe it too was affected. I tried opening my backup directory as root, copying/pasting the config files to my home directory, and changing the permissions, but that didn't work. I really don't want to start from scratch with all my application settings. I want to have everything working as it did before. Also, if I can understand the problem then maybe I can prevent this from happening again in the future and be more self-assured of my backup options. I'd like to find an expert who can remote access my PC and see if they can get Back In Time or Duplicati to work reliably. If that can't be done, then see if the config files in my home directory can be fixed. For educational and security purposes, I plan to video capture the screen during the job. I'm open to using TeamViewer or AnyDesk for remote access but I prefer the latter since I've had better experience using it on Linux then TeamViewer. FYI, it appears the config files for AnyDesk and TeamViewer weren't affected. EDIT: I'm using Linux Mint 19.3.