Here would be the scenario; Serialization works like this: a) You make your program. b) Your program creates and updates data. Updates might created new data, modify existing data or delete data. c) At some point you serialize all the data to a file. d) Later you load the data. Things are as they were at the end of step b. e) At some later point you serialize the data again. The archive includes all the data currently in your C++ program. Any data you deleted in your program isn't there any more. I don't know if this helps - but there it is. Robert Ramey

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This makes me wonder if you're using serialization for some purpose other than that for which it was intended. Would like to expand on this?

Robert Ramey I want to save many objects in a {text|xml}_archive, later load and delete some of them, which are not needed anymore. So my question is what is happening with objects which are not needed anymore? How they are removed from an archive?

Przemek