Here's one solution: find a system with perl5.8 installed. copy your DB file to that system, and unthaw it there. Dump the raw data, copy it to the Perl5.10 system, then import it back into the DB. Storable is not very portable. I've been burned in the past because I upgraded Storable, and it wasn't backwards compatible with the older version. If you need the data to be portable across multiple systems, forget it. Switch to a different serializer. I like YAML. Also, checkout Data::Serializer.