I just updated my iPhone 4 (yes, I know it is old) to iOS 7.1.2. Before I did this, I did a backup of my contacts, notes and photos to my iCloud account. Once this was done, I downloaded and installed the new OS. Everything worked out after about three hours, but only my contacts came back. The other items are missing. I've looked at my iCloud account on my laptop and it shows a large file of data being there for the date of the backup, but it doesn't allow me to do anything with it. I can't even view what's in there. I tried the traditional double-click, right click, etc., but nothing happens.

They say that you're just supposed to connect to WiFi, power up and lock the phone and the transfer from iCloud will happen automatically, but that's not happening. There's no option on the phone itself to do a manual recovery, only a backup TO the iCloud account.

Am I missing something?

Ed, not sure how much help this will be - but when I was supporting 50 some iPhones at my last job, I always did full backups and restores via iTunes and never through iCloud. I just don't trust it to work 100 percent of the time.
You might also be able to take it to an Apple Store if there's one locally.

Jeff