Transfer a 30GB tar file from one remote server to another - restrained by disk space

Solution 1:

Don't tar. Use rsync -av to preserve permissions while transfering the files. Though like tar, this does not preserve selinux context. Not that I would consider that important though.

Solution 2:

You probably want to buy more disk space, but assuming you don't, you could...

pipe the tarball around rather than downloading it.

newserver#  ssh olduser@oldserver "cat /path/to/tarball" | tar xf -

or if you don't have SSH access to your old server

newserver# wget -O - http://oldserver/path/to/tarball | tar xf -

or use rsync like Dennis said.

Be creative. There are other solutions I'm not mentioning.