If I understand you correctly, yes.
So going to a given version of root is unambiguous - you get it as it was at that time.
I failed to recall the name of another backup system which works like Apple’s time machine and which I used, but you’ve reminded me: rsnapshot
rsnapshot is a great set of scripts that uses links to minimise the file storage space needed to preserve the file tree at each snapshot. What’s nice is that it creates a tree in the filesystem with a copy of each snapshot in it, which means you can explore the tree with all the normal filesystem tools. Each time a snapshot is generated, only changed filles are copied to the tree, if a file is unchanged, a link is created instead, so each version of a file is only stored once.