Compress and remove original directory with limited storage

You can try the --remove-files argument to tar. Say you want to compress everything on directory FOO, you would: tar -czf FooCompressed.tar.gz --remove-files FOO

Arguments explained:

• c: create TAR
• z: compress using GZIP, you can switch to -j for BZIP2 or -J for LZMA(xz)
• f: output to file instead of of STDOUT
• remove-files: self explanatory