---
title: Introduction
framework: cocoa
role: article
path: apple-archive/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/Archiving
---

# Introduction

Explains how to put Cocoa objects into and remove them from a representation suitable for archiving.

## Organization of This Document

This programming topic contains the following articles:

- [Object Graphs](Articles/objectgraphs.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/20001293-CJBDFIBI) introduces the concept of an object graph and discusses the two techniques for turning objects into byte streams: archives and serializations. - [Archives](Articles/archives.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/20000946-BAJDBJAI) describes the different types of archive and archiver classes. - [Creating and Extracting Archives](Articles/creating.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/20000949-BABGBHCA) describes how to create and extract an archive. - [Encoding and Decoding Objects](Articles/codingobjects.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/20000948-BCIHBJDE) describes how to implement the methods that allow an object to be encoded in and decoded from archives. - [Encoding and Decoding C Data Types](Articles/codingctypes.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/20001294-BBCBDHBI) describes how to encode and decode C data types that do not have convenience methods defined in the archive classes. - [Forward and Backward Compatibility for Keyed Archives](Articles/compatibility.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/20001055-BCICFFGE) provides some tips on how to make your classes more compatible with previous and future versions of your classes in keyed archives. - [Subclassing NSCoder](Articles/subclassing.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/20000951-BABEIEHG) provides some tips on how to create your own coder classes. - [Serializing Property Lists](Articles/serializing.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/20000952-BABBEJEE) describes how to create and read serialized representations of a property list.

[Next](Articles/objectgraphs.html)

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