Ok whack idea #34... Well sort of, the idea was sparked by ExtFile (yes its all his fault honest). We want to have files on the file system for many reasons which I won't go into now, just take it for granted. But we also want some of the objects information to be in the standard data.fs, so we can catalog it use acquisition provide a simple interface to it and so on. So far you are saying thats ExtFile and you are right. But we want to extend it to any object anywhere, instead of storing the data attribute in the object and pickling it in the ZODB I want to be able to store the data attribute on the file system. This gives us loads of advantages we also thought this would be extremely useful to other people. We've bounced around ideas on how to do this and here the only two so far: - we could overload the data attribute with a class that on Pickling into the ZODB instead writes it on to the filesystem... - we could in the ZODB put a hack to say if pickling something with so and so attribute do this instead... I feel like this something I should just not be doing, but it would be great if I could get it work... -- Andy McKay.