Like Richard said, you copy to/paste from the Clipboard, in whatever format suits your app (text, image, file list, ...); and you serialize to/from permanent storage in some format (binary, XML, ...) to make your object persistent. Those are two distinct mechanisms with different purposes. :)
Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [Why QA sucks] [My Articles]
I only read code that is properly formatted, adding PRE tags is the easiest way to obtain that.
[The QA section does it automatically now, I hope we soon get it on regular forums as well]