[The Geek]

You did, its called 'total'.
However the current problem with the datastore and the hook system is that you need to tell vB which 'datastores' you want caching. The problem being that you CANT do this without file edits as all hooks come AFTER the datastore is created.
Your only solution is to do what you did (hijack another 'datastore' that is cached by default) or manually query the datastore:

$myds = $db->query_read("SELECT data FROM " . TABLE_PREFIX . "datastore WHERE title ='mydatastore'");

$mydatastore = unserialize($myds['data']);

Bit of a bugger really