How do I preserve a complex object across Activity restarts?

Say I have a Java Bean object which is serializable. I want to store it away safely when an Activity goes through onDestroy() on purpose (i.e. onSaveInstanceState() is not called).

I am looking for a way which doesn't involve creating a database and write the object to that (mostly since a) Android's DB API is horrible and b) since databases make application updates a nightmare, because there is no decent support for applying migrations).

I thought about serializing the object to a ByteArrayOutputStream, base64 encode that and write it to a SharedPreferences file as a string. Or is that too far off?

UPDATE

Maybe that serialize-to-string idea wasn't that bad after all, seems to work out pretty well. Here's what I'm doing now:

    public static String objectToString(Serializable object) {
    ByteArrayOutputStream out = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
    try {
        new ObjectOutputStream(out).writeObject(object);
        byte[] data = out.toByteArray();
        out.close();

        out = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
        Base64OutputStream b64 = new Base64OutputStream(out);
        b64.write(data);
        b64.close();
        out.close();

        return new String(out.toByteArray());
    } catch (IOException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }
    return null;
}

public static Object stringToObject(String encodedObject) {
    try {
        return new ObjectInputStream(new Base64InputStream(
                new ByteArrayInputStream(encodedObject.getBytes()))).readObject();
    } catch (Exception e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }
    return null;
}

in onDestroy() I can then simply write the Base64 string to a preference file, where it's safe until I read it again during the next activity launch. It's a lot faster than I expected and unless your beans carry huge amounts of data, it works pretty well. And even better, you don't have to maintain a DB schema.

Still, I'm curious about how others do this.