Unable to restore from encrypted backup

Hello all,
I was recently doing some “distro-hopping” (and I’m back to UM now–still think it’s the best). Prior to beginning this adventure, I did a full backup of my system to an external drive. I chose the “encrypt” option and backed up. The backup went fine. I tried restoring from it a couple times with different distros (Kubuntu and straight Ubuntu), and I got a “No backup found, waiting for Google to be configured in online accounts” message. Not a big deal then, but now I’m back on Mate as my daily driver and I need to restore from the backup, but I’m getting the same message. As I said, the backup was encrypted, and it wasn’t the only thing on the drive. Any ideas as to what happened?
Thanks,
Joel

P.S. I copied the backup folder to the local disk and it still doesn’t work.

Never mind. It suddenly started working… mysterious.