[Answered ]-How to handle unicode of an unknown encoding in Django?

You can store data, encoded into base64, for example. Or try to analize HTTP headers from browser, may be it is simplier to get proper encoding from there.

Create a File with the data. Use a Django models.FileField to hold a reference to the file.

No it does not involve a ton of I/O. If your file is small it adds 2 or 3 I/O’s (the directory read, the iNode read and the data read.)