Upgraded the hard drive in my PS3, did a full backup of the old one beforehand and restored the backup after setting up the new drive - all my save data is gone

As title. The backup and restore both completed successfully, all my games are still there but my saves are gone. The backup utility did say something about not all data being transferred if it was going onto a different PS3, but the PS3 is the same so it should have transferred everything. I am signed into my PSN account.

EDIT: Turns out all my saves were recoverable from the cloud, but that's only because I have PS+. If I didn't, I'd be SOL and would have to start everything over again. Why didn't the transfer keep my saves?