what is the best approach

[Methedrine]

I think adding compress() / uncompress() functions would be elegant, and providing the constructor you wrote as syntactic sugar is already the best practice. At least that is how I usually do it:

class myclass
{
  public:
    MyClass();
    ~MyClass():
 
    MyClass(CompressedData& data);
 
    compress(CompressedData& data) const; // or serialize() ... or save() ...
    uncompress(CompressedData& data);
 
    // ...
};

class myclass
{
  public:
    MyClass();
    ~MyClass():

    MyClass(CompressedData& data);

    compress(CompressedData& data) const; // or serialize() ... or save() ...
    uncompress(CompressedData& data);

    // ...
};

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