My apologies if this is answered in the FAQ/archives...
If so could you point me to the appropriate place.
I did a full dump of a mounted ext2 FS, eg;
dump -0 -B716800 -j9 -M -f dump /home
followed by a full restore, eg.;
mkfs -t ext2 /dev/ram2
mount /dev/ram2 /mnt
cd /mnt
restore -Mrf dump
The restored files have the same mtime datestamps as
the original dumped ones but...
2006-10-11 19:25:52 UTC in Dump/Restore ext2/ext3 filesystem backup