To the skilled Linux user, rsync and the OpenSSH suite aren't strangers. In fact, they're frequently used and praised by a lot of people for their convenience and versatility. Together they form an excellent remote backup solution.

Rsync supports operations over SSH out of the box. So far there's no problem. To automate those backups, however, you'll need to run a job scheduler (like Dillon's cron daemon). This doesn't pose any problems either - running it unattended does though...

Some of you might know LZMA as the default compression algorhythm of 7zip. *nix counterparts had support through LZMA utils. GNU Tar could be patched to support it, but there was no way for libarchive to support it - until recently. A new spec, a new name (xz) and a future change of license allowed for xz support in the codebase. Since pacman and makepkg rely on libarchive for compression handling, that makes it possible to build and install packages with xz.

For those unfamiliar with LZMA/xz, in the realm of compression formats it stands between gzip and bzip2 for compression and decompression speed, and it tops the list when you talk package size. Now let's have a look at how to get this going.

Arch has this wonderful hook called 'encrypt' that allows you to unlock your encrypted root partition with an external key if you want so. The problem is this implementation is rather rigid - the encrypt hook can only handle one partition and corresponding key for now (actually it can only handle a root partition by default). My 'hack' allows non-root partitions to get mounted automatically without having to resort to /etc/crypttab for unlocking information, but that is a weak point at the same time: you cannot have multiple encrypted partitions with this method - unless, of course, you continue to use /etc/crypttab.