Had to restore my iphone, now almost all apps are missing.

Let me start with, I’m extremely new to this, I did search but came up empty.
-Just jailbroke my iphone 3g Wednesday, installed a bunch of apps through cydia etc.
-did a sync this morning to backup everything.
-phone crashed/locked up whatever you wanna call it, stuck on the loading apple.
-did the dfu and restored to where the phone was working but
Almost all of my apps, including cydia and everything I installed with it are missing. Even some system apps like calculator and contacts. One app I installed called “categories” (I’m thinking this might be part of the problem)is a folder app and is where I stuck most of the apps but not cydia and a few others.
My ? is, can I get them back easily, if not, I don’t mind too much having to jailbreak again as it was pretty painless but I’d like to understand my options and what is going on.
Any help? Thanks
Answer #1
Moving ~ .
#3.3 Topics must be submitted to the relevant forums. Please read the forum descriptions before posting.
Answer #2
A restore gets a factory (or hacked!) image (just like it says, just in the context of data storage) and applies it, overwritting everything.
You not MUST start from scratch (well, the imaging did that part for you, now you must get everything back again, one by one).
Answer #3
Thanks
,
I thought I read that if the help request was specific to that forum to point it out in the heading. I guess not.