Ran out of disk space, how to tar without creating copy

Use the mysqldump utility to direct the file wherever you like:

mysqldump -A -u[username] -p[password] > /path/to/dest/backupname.sql

If you need to, you can pipe the output through gzip:

mysqldump -A -u[username] -p[password] | gzip -c > /path/to/dest/backupname.gz

Further, you can send the output from gzip to another server via ssh:

mysqldump -A -u[username] -p[password] | gzip -c | ssh [email protected] 'cat >  /path/to/dest/backupname.gz'