• Four things really matter when choosing binary usenet servers:
  • What you need to know
    • Completion: It’s a non-issue. No one loses articles any more. All the Newsgroup companies have solid peering relationships with each other so barring any kind of system crashes, all the providers get all the articles.
      • But : You may occasionally find that a whole group of articles, all associated with a specific attachment, may be missing. Purposely removed, actually. This is because all the Usenet Providers are very diligent about responding to RIAA and other copyright holder’s requests to remove copyrighted material. It’s the same for all the providers – they all get the same notices and they all follow the rules these days. If you’re trying to access an article using an NZB file and it is missing, don’t blame the Usenet provider – those holes in the article counts are there because they’re keeping things legal.
    • Retention:
      • How much is enough?
        • In our opinion, 150 days (about 5 months) is plenty for anyone. If you have a Usenet account somewhere, you are going to be checking it for new content at least every other week – probably every other day. Having 3 or 4 months of history to go back to is useful if you occasionaly miss part of a conversation or need to reference an old attachment but it’s a rarity.
      • When is more better?
        • 1. When you are first starting to use Usenet, you will want to go WAAAAY back to catch up on the beginnings of discussions and access old attachments to start building your library.
        • 2. Once in a blue moon you will realize you’ve missed something important, or you start following a new newsgroup – you will want to go back to its roots just like someone getting involved in Usenet for the first time. For us, we found that our membership in the most expensive plan on the market was worth every penny when we were trying to find an old 1987 clip of the XRCO movie awards that had been posted over a year earlier.
      • How is Usenet Retention calculated?
        • The number of days of retention reported on most providers’ home pages are how far back they have Usenet articles. But not all of those articles are necessarily available. The headers (the titles that your newsreader downloads) may go back a considerably less number of days. The only way to access articles that no longer have headers is to use an NZB file that accesses articles by a universal tag number. For some Usenet services the difference is only a few days, but for others it can be a 100 to 300 day difference!
        • Disk space is cheap these days, so retaining articles is no problem. It’s the headers that are a problem. Usenet headers need to be stored in a database for easy access, and while they don’t take up much space, the sheer volume is astounding. The two major Newsgroup Server companies use different software to manage it all, with different database structures – and some database structures are better at handling astronomical numbers of records than others. What makes it even harder to manage is that a newsgroup with relatively low activity will not reach the maximum number of database records for a long time, so the headers may be available as far back as the articles. In another group with lots of activity, the provider may need to purge old headers more often so the database doesn’t overflow or crash – even though all the articles are still on the hard drives. This is why you’ll see us list some usenet providers as having 500-ish days of retention. They may have 700+ days of articles available, but depending on the volume in a specific newsgroup there could be anywhere from 300 to 700 days of headers to access them by.