Hi. I right now managed to store objects via serialization onto harddisk. Because these files are still big and i used the textstream to serialize the object i decided to shrink the files...so far the plan :) I rebuild the iostreams with bzip support (that was also quite a pain ;) and now i can decompress a simple precompressed text file easily: int main() { using namespace std; using namespace boost::iostreams; ifstream file("E:\\test.txt.bz2", ios_base::in | ios_base::binary); filtering_streambuf<input> in; in.push(bzip2_decompressor()); in.push(file); ofstream fileOutput("E:\\test2.text"); copy(in,fileOutput); } But if i try to decompress a file which i serialized, bzip just runs forever doing nothing. SO my first question is, if someone knows why the serialized compressed files can not be decompressed. My second question is, if it is possible to serialize directly into a compressed bz2 file. I really looked around in the internet but still cannot get a clue so please respond. http://www.codeproject.com/KB/stl/zipstream.aspx?fid=16084&df=90&mpp=25&sort=Position&select=737834&tid=1192811 http://lists.boost.org/Archives/boost/2003/10/53755.php Thanks, SK