title: Need to store strings, numbers and multidimensional numpy arrays together on disk
body: <p>My app needs to save the fields of an object to disk so they can be easily loaded again later. Currently I'm just pickling the entire object and compressing the file with gzip, but the files are still huge (I assume because of the arrays) and take longer than I'd like to save. Is there some way to store the arrays better? Or a different approach entirely?</p>
  
  <p>cPickle doesn't seem to improve the speed. And I've looked into HDF5 h5py for storing the arrays, but I'd like to keep everything together. This is my first time working on a problem like this, so if there is a nice combination of solutions I'd appreciate it.</p>