Answer by diederikh for Recreating core data at application launch

If you want to load all the data in memory (and also want to do updates) then you can create a managed object context backed by a NSAtomicStore persistent store subclass. In the NSAtomicStore subclass you can implement the read: (load: method) and the CRUD actions (newReferenceObjectForManagedObject:, save: and updateCacheNode:fromManagedObject: methods)