You can do this, but only if you know exactly what that state means. In practice this is almost certainly too fragile to be useful. If you change anything you probably invalidate your understanding of this data and cause chaos.

Rust's in memory data structures don't have any meaning on their own, they only have meaning in the context of the running program.

This is, in fact, the whole point of the New Type Idiom. If I have two types Minutes(u32) and Years(u32) those are represented in memory the same way, an unsigned 32-bit integer, just four bytes. But because Rust is statically Type Checked, everywhere the programs knows which is which, you can't assign a Minutes to a Years, or a Years to a Minutes, for the same reason you can't assign "Hacker News" to an f64.

But this means a 32-bit value in your hypothetical file could be either a Minutes or a Years, and a program loading that file needs to know a priori which it is. Once you start coming up with rules about how you'd do that, you're inventing a serialisation format, and you're exactly back to the problem where your original question arose.