Helium backup app will be the end of me (and plenty others from the sounds of it)

Hello all on xda forums. I am new here and need some help restoring my phone. I was rooted on 4.2 Kitkat and decided to upgrade to 5.0 lolipop on my Galaxy S4 Active (GT-I9295). I made the mistake of using helium to backup my apps and now can not restore my apps. When I look in the app folders on my PC there are no files in the folders which makes it impossible to use the server client. I backed up the full app on helium so I would assume that there would be some files there. I've heard some people say that you have to re-install all of your apps and then restore the data. I have really slow internet and would like to avoid this method if possible. Let me know if you need more information. (Cant upload images since I'm new here sorry about that)