Solder your flasher to the NOR (BIOS) and Syscon (System Controller) chips on the motherboard to extract their data.
A common follow-up question: “But what if I have a development PS4 (DEV Kit) or a console with a modchip?”
Connect your reader to the NOR and Syscon chips and backup their data to a PC.
As one community member noted, "The only way a 'downgrade' is possible is using an exploit with the same permissions as the exploit you would be downgrading to use". This creates a circular dependency: you need high-level access to perform the downgrade, but the downgrade is intended to grant that access.