The tricky thing is that hacking is usually an iterative process, and these iterations are going to be an extreme exercise in patience.
Actually, another tricky thing: how do you know that the other end is actually cooperating? If the aliens are dicks they could give you the thumbs up while having zero intention to reconstitute your consciousness. If you wanted to round-trip some brave soul as a means of verifying everything works, they could just send one of their own minds back instead, just for the fun of wreaking havoc.