That's more or less what serialization is.  Java's built-in
serialization does have some very nice additional behavior when it comes
to objects that hold references to other, shared objects, however, in
that the deserialized versions refer to one common copy of the original
instead of to different ones.  That can in fact be very important for
correctness.  The built-in serialization mechanism also handles all the
details automatically, for any Serializable type, so that you don't have
to write custom serialization code for most types of object you want to
transfer.