I need this roadmap of a Hibernate managed object instance.

First, I create an instance with initial properties and persist this object in a db. Then session associated with this object is closed. But still, I serialize my object and on the next step deserialize it, invoke some setters, and again, I need to update what changed in a database.

What methods of Hibernate session should I use? persist() or save() on the first step and saveOrUpdate() on the second?

In fact I see that saveOrUpdate() can be used on each step.

What would you recommend?