> 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.

I've used the crate `savefile` for this in the past (https://docs.rs/savefile/latest/savefile/), which also supports migrating data between versions. So if you have a bunch of on-disk data of a struct and you add a new property, you can handle migrating the data on the fly to the new struct structure.

I'm also using `savefile` for saving HN items (comments and stories) to disk in my own HN application: https://codeberg.org/ditzes/ditzes/src/branch/master/src-tau... and it's very quick to load stuff from disk, haven't hit any bottlenecks really

Example: https://ditzes.com/item/35640002 (SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas) has 1223 comments which are individually loaded from disk, takes around 100ms to load from disk, which considering how inefficient and unoptimized the code is, I'm pretty happy with.