Thank you in advance for trying to answer my question.

Recently I backed up my computer with Nero 7. Then I reformatted my
computer. When I tried to restore the backup, Nero 7 let me see the
files and choose the files to restore, but when I tried to restore it,
it just spat out .defect files. My friend successfully restored a
backup made with Nero 6. He showed me the file and I compared it. An
example of my file opened with notepad is

 "U       Û.H         H o g i a u s 1     H o g i a u s 1 H   1 8 F D
A 8 E C - F 1 2 2 - 4 6 F 1 - B E F 2 - 7 2 4 4 8 C 0 2 8 C 2 F >   K
: \ 2 0 0 5 2 6 1 0 _ 1 5 0 4 5 1 _ H o g i a u s 1 . n b i (   Å?Üýâ 
,möçê-Q?Þåë'zØýPÈ/ ?#û¬É+cc¿lÐv  |¨ $$­?ñ [D¨  rÎ1Ú    (   M i c r o s
o f t   W i n d o w s   X P <   N e r o   B a c k I t U p   V e r s i
o n   1 . 2 . 0 . 5 4     >   K : \ 2 0 0 5 1 1 0 6 _ 1 8 4 7 2 3 _ H
o g i a u s 1 . n b i     ¬VÍ+×2$ 2
    Ø

As you can see, the filenames are separated by spaces.
Here is my friend's

                       æ       ¬        ñã??ÚÅ °°"1 ØÅ °°"1 ØÅ H   a  
[   C:\WINDOWS\WinSxS\Manifests\x86_Microsoft.MSXML2_6bd6b9abf345378f_4.0.2.0_x-ww_702998db.cat?
  x86_Microsoft.MSXML2_6bd6b9abf345378f_4.0.2.0_x-ww_702998db.cat

Here they aren?t.
I tried opening it with Nero 6, but here it says its corrupted. I am
at my wits end for I have important information for my business on
here. Your time is greatly appreciated. Expect a tip.

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Clarification of Question by hogiaus-ga on 14 Nov 2005 15:40 PST

I think it has something to do with the spaces. But wouldnt it be very
time consuming to delete them all, and make sure i dont delete any
important spaces? Why would it do this?

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Request for Question Clarification by cynthia-ga on 14 Nov 2005 16:07 PST

After you created the backups, did you open any of the files from the
CD --to confirm they were ok?

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Clarification of Question by hogiaus-ga on 14 Nov 2005 18:40 PST

I backed this up on a hard drive and no, I did not. (I worshipped Nero too much)

I don't know anything about Nero.

You say you reformatted your computer.  It may still be possible to
get your data - or more likely some of your data - back from the HD. 
Particularly if you
leave the HD unused until a copy is taken for recovery.  It will also
help if you know something about the important files you want so that
they can be recognised when seen.  What capacity is the HD ?

http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/story/0,10801,70076,00.html

A laptop, 60gb

There are affordable desktop drives a lot bigger than 60 Gb.  That
means if you copy an image of the laptop disk to a file on a larger
disk using a live CD like Knoppix there's potential for recovering
some data from that in the event that you  don't discover how to read
the Nero CD.

The very small fragment of CD you showed has something on it - I think
it would be worth looking over the whole CD for strings you expect to
see in your files as it might be possible to read them off the CD
without using Nero s/w.

The spaces you are seeing are most likely caused by the software
having used Unicode when it created the file. Check to see if you have
an option to select the text mode, and make sure it is using Unicode.