I have a master and various slave servers.there is a huge amount of the data on all the servers and I wish to create an archiving system for our data.

You're question is almost 100% unanswerable. You have not provided any information about your program, your db, what you are really attempting to do. We cannot see you screen, your computer, connect to your servers, or read your mind. You need to provide more information than what you have. And "but is not working" tells us absolutely nothing. Remember the answer always lays in the details, and the details are what you have forgotten.

I will give you a hint based on what I think you are attempting. Create an archive version of your db with the exact same meta data as your production db. Then copy all the data from you production db to the archive and then delete from production.