Disclaimer: I haven't used the serialization library, nor have I carefully read your code example. I simply wonder whether your mental model of deserialization agrees with that used by Boost.Serialization. I believe (!) that when deserializing an object through a pointer, Boost.Serialization allocates a new object before filling (some of) its fields from the incoming data stream. You seem to expect Boost.Serialization to reuse an existing object in memory instead. (I hadn't previously encountered the phrase "partial serialization.") I believe that in the typical use case addressed by Boost.Serialization, the deserializing process has no direct access to the memory data used by the serializing process. That might be because the serializing process is shutting down for later resumption, or it might be that the serializing process is running on a different machine than the deserializing process. In either case, the only object fields on which the deserializing process can rely are those that were explicitly serialized and deserialized by your code. Put differently, any fields you fail to de/serialize must be assumed to be uninitialized. You may have an unusual use case. If you can somehow pass some of the fields of your memory object to the receiving process other than through Boost.Serialization -- may we ask why not all of them? Why are you using Boost.Serialization at all? Apologies if I haven't properly understood your issue.