The renaming bit isn't really necessary, though. You can open the backup neighborhood package file directly from SimPE by clicking the Open icon or clicking the File menu, then open, and then navigate to the directory where your backup is stored. Then do the extracting from there. Then you can open your current neighborhood as usual. Making a backup of the current neighborhood first is always recommended, of course.
Or you can double-click the neighborhood package file to open in SimPE if you have them associated with SimPE like me.