Modern computer systems may comprise massive sets of data objects of various types, such as data files, application binaries, database objects, proprietary objects managed by applications such as email systems, and system configuration information. Applying complex operations, such as archiving and synchronization operations, to many and varied data objects may be difficult to perform manually or through a script. A more advantageous technique involves applying data object managers to the data object set, where such data object managers are configured to apply various rule comprising a task to be performed on the data object set in furtherance of the operation to various data object types in the data object set. Additionally, the data object set may be modeled as a hierarchical data object set map, to which the rules may be applied through the data object managers in a more uniform manner.