A system and method for supporting persistent store archival and retrieval in a distributed computing environment. The system provides a central portal operative to initiate the archiving (or retrieval) which is executed in parallel across all members with access to persisted stores, either being sent or gathered from an archive repository. The system and method can include an archive coordinator associated with an in-memory data grid. The archive coordinator receives an instruction to store a snapshot of a current state of the in-memory data grid, the instruction including a storage location, the storage location being a destination selected from the group consisting of a local disk and a shared disk. The system can archive the snapshot of the current state of the in-memory data grid at the storage location.