I have a roughly 30 GB archive split into 15 parts, with no compression. Extracting it normally requires another 30 GB of free space, which I do not currently have. Is there any way to extract the files gradually while deleting or reclaiming the archive data as it is processed, so I can avoid needing enough storage for both the archive and the extracted files?
3 Answers
There are a few limited workarounds. If you have another computer, a tar archive can sometimes be streamed over SSH and extracted directly on the other machine. A RAM-backed temporary filesystem could also work if you have enough memory, but that is risky and unlikely to handle a 30 GB extraction comfortably. For split archives, deleting each volume as soon as it is read might appear possible with some tools, but a failure could leave you needing to download the missing volume again, and it may not be safe for every archive format.
Generally, no. Archive formats are not designed to remove portions safely while they are being extracted. Even when an archive utility offers a delete option, it usually has to create a new archive while the original still exists, so it does not solve the free-space problem. The practical solution is temporary storage, such as an external drive.
You may be able to extract individual, independent files and then remove them from an archive in some applications, but modifying the archive normally requires rewriting it and temporarily keeping the old copy. That makes it slow and still requires extra space. An external hard drive or another temporary storage device is the safest and simplest option.
For multi-volume archives, the parts can depend on one another, so deleting a volume during extraction is not something to rely on unless the specific format and tool explicitly support it.