I have a serialized object which I added an enum to. This makes it no longer compatible with older versions of the software. I believe this is because the older version is compiled with Java 1.4. I get:

```
java.io.InvalidClassException: cannot bind enum descriptor to a non-enum class

```

Ideally I would like to replace the enum with a String and somehow fix the existing object. 

A couple of ideas are:

1. When reading the serialized object, ignore the field with the enum. The value would be lost, but that's OK.
2. Have two copies of the serialized class, renaming the one with the enum and somehow read the object into the newly renamed class.