What exactly do you mean by "restore a backup"? There are dozens of possibilities under this umbrella term...

If you mean restoring from a drive image then the answer to both is obviously no, because the drive image being reswtore must overwrite everything in the target drive.

If you're thinking about other situation please clarify.

Thanks for your reply.

I use 'Backups' to backup my files to an external drive. Of course, I don't want to overwrite files that I've worked on since my last backup, but, there are older files since deleted (foolishly thought I wouldn't need them) that I'd like to retrieve.

Before I proceed I want to be sure all is safe.

If the tool you've use allows recovering of inividual files it shouldn't be a problem as long as you know exactly what you need to recover and what you shouldn't because older than the current versions.

I'll give it a try with some non-essential file. Thanks for the help!