Can you resort single game saves?

[Spiderbri]

For whatever reason, trophy hunting, alt endings,etc it has been suggested at different times to delete a game save, do something and then put the original save back.

My question is, can you restore individual game data? or do you have to back up the entire harddrive. delete one save file, do whatever, the restore the entire back up over already existing data?

if so then I certainly won't be doing that. just seems like to much trouble, plus I can just see something going wrong or getting corrupted by saving what's already there.

Thanks.