I'm familiar with pretty much anything but canning, but dry preservation is another matter.
For meat, an equal mix of salt, sugar, and 1/3rd of finely ground red pepper made into a paste and smeared on hams and pork bellies right before you start smoking them does well, other times straight salt. some people would start them in salt and then bury them in fine hardwood sawdust or burn white sulfur and coat them for extra-long storage, they turn ghost white, but the sulfur is harmless. this also works on beef, goat and deer.
Sometimes Grandpa would make jerky, we would pound the meat flat with wooden mallets and store it in a box of salt for a couple of months until it dried out, then hang it on a stainless hook or thread it on a waxed string and smoke it. Sometimes we would do fish as well, but normally it got canned with the soft parts.
We used to "sulfur" apples and peaches, I have heard you can do cherries as well, but we never got it quite right, it could be the moisture in the basement was wrecking our efforts.
How many of you urban hillbillies have a drying car set out in the sun? you make drying rack frames out of old pallets and put coarse screen wire on the bottom, then spread whatever fruit it is you're drying on it, it helps if it's sliced thinly, then stack them up in the drying car in direct sunlight in the summer sun.
