Accessing Created Backups

I wasn't sure which Category this belonged to, my apologies if I chose the wrong section.

I am in the process of creating a "one off" backup of an external (1TB) drive, this will be my first Paragon backup.

The drive in question has archived info dating back more than 12 years, so much of the data will be redundant, but I wanted to save state before I reformat the drive so I can selectively recover the data.

Should I have done a backup, or would Drive copy have been a better way to go for this purpose? ... I don't have a clean drive I could copy to, which is why I went the Backup route to start with.

Once the (pvhd) backup has completed, am I able to mount the created backup and remove specific files, or will I need to create a new file backup from the mounted copy to save only those files I want to retain?