If Storable is doing it for you, don’t worry. It’s only something to worry about in certain circumstances or if you like to be able to eye-ball the data. Storable and JSON both serialize and marshal (deserialize) references. It’s fully reconstituted, it just has to be accessed with dereferencing semantics (%$hash or $hash->{key}); you might want to look at perlref. Sounds like you have it working now though, so ++