The present invention provides a system and methods for flexible data archival using a model-driven approach. The data archive system and method of the present invention provides the operation of moving data from original data repository into archive data repository. Users can specify archive conditions describing which portions of the data will be moved. The method may have steps such as analyzing application content, defining an archive model, transforming the model by generating an archive specification based upon the modeling result and building an application based upon the archive model and deploying the new model and archive application.