The invention is directed towards methods and apparatuses for archiving and unarchiving objects. Some embodiments of the invention archive and unarchive objects that have global and user settings in multi-user environments. To archive objects, these embodiments identify which object settings are global settings and which settings are user settings. They store the global settings in an archive, and then store the user settings in another archive. To unarchive each object, some embodiments identify the object's settings in one or both archives. These embodiments instantiate the object, and retrieve its settings from the data archives and use the retrieved settings to define the values of the settings of the instantiated object. Some embodiments use key-value coding techniques to retrieve values and load values in an object. Key-value coding allows an archiving or unarchiving process to retrieve and load setting values for an object by using the setting names.