Some embodiments of the invention provide a variable persister that allows an application running on a device to efficiently make a set of variables persistent across termination and relaunch of the application. According to some embodiments of the invention, an application executing on the device can utilize this archiving service by simply having its persisted variables declared in the application's code as variables that are to be persisted. Based on such declarations, the variable persisting service of the device stores the values of the set of persisted variables in a non-volatile storage archive (e.g., disk, flash storage, etc.) when the application terminates, and retrieves these values from the archive when the application restarts such that the values of the persisted variables are restored to a state before the application was last terminated.