I think the goal is to save as much as you can in the interim. Holding onto X bytes of archives is more time worth of data than X bytes of uncompressed. We do that stuff all the time in finance. Stuff gets spewed off to external places and local copies get kept but archived and we simply rotate the oldest stuff out as we go. If the cleanup process is configured separately from the archiving process you can absolutely archive things just to remove them shortly thereafter.