Storable produces binary data that can only be ready by the same version of Storable as you used to produce this. I'm pretty sure this is your problem. You have two solutions: The best is to ensure that everywhere you need to restore the data uses same version of storable. The second solution is to use a module which doesn't use a binary, version incompatible way to store data, such as Data::Dump, or even XML::Simple or a YAML module should do what you need. This way you can be sure of always being able to read the data.