Storable and Data::Dumper have their pros and cons. Data::Dumper is slow and verbose. Yes. Storable, however, is much more fragile. If I have two different versions of Storable, it'll be difficult to get them to talk to each other (e.g., persistance crossing upgrade boundaries, or jumping from machine to machine). Yet Data::Dumper works here just fine.

Data::Dumper is nice in that it is completely upwards and downwards compatable. That costs - both in CPU speed, and space usage.