Storable.pm is supposed to be backwards-compatible. You should be able to read a (nstore) storable file with every Storable version which is same or newer as the Storable module used for writing.
Doing a straight scp of them from a FreeBSD box to a Linux box broke mine. I suppose scp might be to blame? Systems stuff is a screaming left hand turn from my forte.
I guess I trust scp more than Storable :-) Maybe it was some intermediate problem ("a bug")? If you can still reproduce it, then I would be interested in it.