How can I fully restore my iPhone 4S and then selectively restore data?

[DocBoxInACan]

Hey there,

I'm one of the many people in the boat where I want (need) to fully wipe and restore my iPhone 4S on 5.1.1, hoping it will fix issues like battery life etc. I've also noticed I still have some leftover jailbreak data in my iPhone's current OS which has stayed there due to me accidentally restoring to a backup that happened while I was jailbroken. I am no longer jailbroken and do not particularly want to jailbreak again. My only issue is there are a few things which I crucially need to keep (in other words, backup and then add back onto the iPhone later). I need to be able to restore:

• App Data (Such as game progress and any data my apps have)
• Contacts
• Notes
• Messages (Very important)
• Wi-Fi Settings (If that's not possible, it doesn't really matter)
• SpringBoard Layout!!! (No idea if this is possible, I have heavily organised folders that would be a great pain to organise again)
• Photos (I'm only putting this on this list as I have a question - I understand I can simply copy all my photos using Windows but as for restoring, iPhones seem to randomly name the folders it sorts the Camera Roll into with a jumble of numbers and letters which I'm sure really does mean something. How would I go about restoring photos?)

I've been browsing around the internet, effectively getting incredibly confused and I need some guidance. A guide, in a way, of how to do each step. It's made me wonder about the path of possibly creating my own iPhone backup selectively with all the bits of data I want to preserve - I wonder if there's a way. Anyway, I have a full license for the latest version of iExplorer, which I heard mentioned a lot across the internet, along with iPhone Backup Extractor, MobileSyncBrowser, and DiskAid. I've got no idea what tool to use, or how you're supposed to be able to restore this stuff. Restoring App Data using iExplorer, though, seems like an incredibly easy task, however as for Contacts and the rest, particularly Messages, I have no idea. I'm not even sure HOW you can use iExplorer to put data ONTO the iPhone, as opposed to just pulling it off.

Any advice is greatly appreciated!

Many Thanks,
George (My surname is apparently a censored word :/ )