[drewr]

I didn't look closely at the project, but why take the extra step of base64? I do this all the time with tar by itself and it's wire-proof enough to work fine.

[sigwinch]

In some cases, shar would be a useful wrapper for that.

[owl_vision]

something like this, i recon:

  $ tar cf - ~/.shrc | ssh target '(cd ~ && tar xf -)'