I looked at the email and really didn't understand what you wanted the library to do that it doesn't already do. I could have starting a back and forth trying to figure this out, but I think it would better just to summarize what the library does do. The library saves and restores any data structures which can be represented in C++. Soooooooo. If you have some dataset which cannot fit into memory all at once, its not really representable as a C++ data structure. What you would have is a C++ data structure for handling data too large to fit all at once in memory. Presumably you already have some sort of infrastructure for handling this data (or plan to build one). If what you are asking is whether serialization library provides such an infrastructure, the answer would be No - it does not. Howeever, it might still be helpful. Suppose you have some sort set up some sort of code for paging, on-demand load or what ever implemented in C++ which pointed to or managed some sort of off-line storage, the C++ implemenation could save its state and restore it which seems to me would be what you want. Its also possible that the serialization library might be used to save and restore pieces at a time. Sooooo, I don't think the serialization library addresses what you want, but it may (or may not) be helpful in achieving your goal. Robert Ramey "Sean Cavanaugh" <worksonmymachine@gmail.com> wrote in message news:3ae31ecb0707050116w698de581pf1420f0b7ddce612@mail.gmail.com... I'm a bit new to boost and am trying to determine if I can coax the existing boost serialization system to work for a fairly standard asset loading system. Assets in my domain of game programming are things such as bitmaps, model geometry, audio data, shaders, and various chunks of meta data attached to them. The quantity of such data should always be assumed to vastly exceed the ability to load it all at once, which means getting sneaky when dealing with persistence. From my point of view the boost::serialization code is missing a lot of important features, so I am kind of surprised that they are not there.