Giganews Usage

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Post by Winnow »

Sylvus wrote:I just got my 500Gb hd installed, and finally got Newsleecher's RnE working, and I've dl'ed probably 100 GB in the last few days.

I don't know how I ever lived without RnE before!!
Nice work on getting into the 100GB club! I'm up to 1.6TB total since starting up with Giganews.

RnE internal automated support was such a great idea from the Newsleecher developer. How's it working for you? I've heard it's still being fine tuned so is slow for some people. Sounds like it's working well for you though!

PAR2 files are the last remaining reason for me to believe that there might be a God. If someone started up a PAR2 cult, I'd probably join it. :twisted:
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Post by Sylvus »

RnE is working phenomenally for me. Not to mention the new HD. Before I was dl'ing everything to my big external HD, so I'd have like 50-100GB worth of DVDs sitting on it, which I'd then have to check the pars on, unzip over USB to my local drive, then I'd burn from there. Took me forever.

Now I'm dl'ing, repairing, unzipping and burning from the 7200.10 drive, along with RnE, and it saves me tons of time. I just start dl'ing before bed, come home from work the next day, and have like 10-15 things ready to burn.

I HIGHLY recommend getting Repair n Extract working if you haven't already.
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Post by Winnow »

Sylvus wrote: I HIGHLY recommend getting Repair n Extract working if you haven't already.
Yeah, I'll check it out. I like to micro manage sometimes but when I grab an entire TV series or other mass downloads, manually scanning over the par situation and extracting, then deleting stuff takes a little time and that doesn't fit into my efficiency philosophy for gathering data! I love Newsleecher's folder structure options and multiple ways to leech in an organized manner. Newsleecher automatically making a file name all caps if it's not complete is a nice touch as well and saves me time from having to par check file sets unless I see one of the files capped.

I'm not a big burner though except for 360 games which must be burned. I watch movies, download episodes, etc via my PC either over HTPC via projector or or networked to my laptop depending. I take it your setup works best with burned DVDs. Better for archiving as well!
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Post by Sylvus »

I like to burn DVD's mostly for the flexibility of where I can watch them. I spend a good amount of time every summer up north on the lake, and in other seasons down in florida. I like to be able to bring DVDs with me on the plane or to watch during bad weather/at night. I also lend out a lot of dvds to friends and such. Plus I just don't have the storage to keep hundreds of DVDs on my drive, whereas I have a big DVD case that holds a few hundred.

Another good thing about RnE is that it won't even download the par files unless the file is incomplete/broken, and it verifies the files as they are downloaded. So by the time you get the last piece of the archive, it knows whether it should then download all the par2 files, or just start extracting. And it'll do that to whatever directory you specify.

Hook it up, you won't be disappointed.
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Post by Winnow »

Sylvus wrote:Plus I just don't have the storage to keep hundreds of DVDs on my drive, whereas I have a big DVD case that holds a few hundred.
I can't remember if we talked about this on the forums or not but do you use the Epson direct to DVD printer for your labels? It works so well. I can't imagine using anything else unless it's a Sharpie which I use on all the 360 DVDs. If I burn a DVD full of comics or something for a friend, I'll usually whip of a snazzy label with graphics and maybe a ToC, but for personal use, I don't care as much about the looks.
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Post by Sylvus »

I buy the DVDs with the white, inkjet printable faces on them, and then use my Epson R220 to print actual/custom dvd labels on them. I get most of them from http://www.cdcovers.cc/ I believe, though there is another site I have bookmarked at home as well.
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Re: Giganews Usage

Post by Xatrei »

PowerUsenet just upgraded their service. I switched to the 19.99 service a couple months back to take advantage of the 75 day retention, so I get the extra features with no changes. If you're using a lower tier of the service, you just got bumped to 105 day retention for cheap, and the 5 extra bucks a month for SSL might be worth it to upgrade!
Power Usenet Powers Up with 105 Days Binary Retention, Additional Connections, and 256-bit Encrypted Usenet!
June 20, 2007

Power Usenet has announced a major upgrade to its Usenet Service now offering 105 days of retention in all binary newsgroups for all customers. In addition to expanding retention, Power Usenet has also increased the amount of concurrent connections on all unlimited accounts and has released 256-bit encrypted Usenet access for its highest account level

All Accounts - 105 Days Binary Retention, 180 Days Text Retention!

Secure Power User: Unlimited Access ($19.99 per month) - Now with 12 Connections and 256-bit Encrypted Usenet Access!

Current $19.99 unlimited access customers will automatically be upgraded to 105 days binary retention, 12 connections, and encrypted Usenet.

Power User: Unlimited Access ($14.95 per month) - Now with 6 Connections!

Current $14.95 unlimited access customers will automatically be upgraded to 105 days binary retention and 6 connections.

All additional Power Usenet accounts will be upgraded to 105 days retention.

Power Usenet has long been the provider of choice for newsgroup users seeking low cost high quality Usenet access. This latest upgrade in our service offering is designed to help further add value for our customers.

105 days of binary retention represents a 40% retention increase for Power Usenet subscribers at no additional charge. These latest improvements help raise the bar and allow Power Usenet to continue to lead the Usenet community in low cost, high quality Usenet access.

If you wish to unsubscribe, please login to your Power Usenet control panel and click on "Address Change".
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Re: Giganews Usage

Post by Winnow »

Oh just stop with whatever usenet binary you're using and get Giganews already:
200 Days Binary Newsgroup Retention at Giganews!

Giganews has completed its third significant storage upgrade of the year which will increase binary retention day by day through the end of the summer to 200 days! Giganews continues to hold text newsgroup articles indefinitely and as a result Giganews' retention in text newsgroups is well over 1400 days.

This latest upgrade comes just two months after Giganews announced 120 day retention in binary groups and only four months after Giganews announced 100 day retention in binary newsgroups.

"This recent push to 200 days retention fits into our normal cycle of perpetual upgrades. Traditionally we haven't increased retention by as large a margin as we are during this current upgrade; however, we have decided to accelerate our upgrade cycle so that we can continue to lead Usenet and provide more value for our customers. By nearly doubling our storage capacity Giganews is investing in our service so our customers can continue to enjoy the best Usenet experience possible." said David Vogelpohl, Giganews' Vice President of Marketing and Sales.

This retention upgrade follows closely after a series of additional security offerings, utility releases, and other value additions to the Giganews service.
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Re: Giganews Usage

Post by Aslanna »

If it was priced at $19.99 for unlimited perhaps. That's as high as I'd go. $25 a month = too much!
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Re: Giganews Usage

Post by Winnow »

Aslanna wrote:If it was priced at $19.99 for unlimited perhaps. That's as high as I'd go. $25 a month = too much!

$5 :!:

worth it for the gagigabitits of stuff to grab! For that one special file that was posted 199 days ago!
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Re: Giganews Usage

Post by Aslanna »

I'm paying $15 a month now. So that would be $10 more! I was just saying $20 is my comfort zone. Financial responsibility!
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Re: Giganews Usage

Post by Winnow »

I can't get enough of Giganews news!

Has anyone used this yet?
Giganews Accelerator Out of Beta

Giganews, Inc., the world's largest Usenet provider, announced today that their software based news proxy, the Giganews Accelerator ™, is now out of beta.

The Giganews Accelerator is a Windows based application which enables Giganews account holders to download compressed newsgroup headers and utilize Giganews' encrypted Usenet access services.

In addition to supporting 256-bit SSL encrypted Usenet for Giganews account holders with SSL enabled, the Giganews Accelerator encrypts all authentication and NNTP commands for every customer, regardless of account level. Encrypted authentication solves a long standing security concern with Usenet access accounts, and encrypted NNTP commands will help some customers avoid traffic limitations on networks between Giganews and their computer.

The header compression function of the Giganews Accelerator will allow for header download speeds up to 10 times faster than with uncompressed headers, a feature particularly helpful to Giganews users who utilize news reader software which downloads all new headers in a newsgroup every time a newsgroup is accessed (Example: Newsbin).

"We're glad to finally be able to offer this product as a final version for our customers. The demand for increased security and faster header download speeds amongst Usenet users has propelled the creation and implementation of technologies, such as the Giganews Accelerator." commented David Vogelpohl, Vice President of Marketing and Sales at Giganews.

Giganews customers wishing to take advantage of 256-bit SSL encrypted Usenet access, encrypted authentication, compressed headers, and encrypted NNTP commands through the Giganews Accelerator can do so by downloading the application at http://www.giganews.com/accelerator. The application is free, but 256-bit SSL encrypted Usenet functionality will require a Giganews SSL enabled account. Encrypted authentication, compressed headers, and NNTP commands are available to every customer regardless of whether 256-bit SSL is enabled on their account.
Didn't know people still used newsreaders that had to download all headers each time.

For for the big groups you don't keep up with, Newsleecher has a "get last 1000, 10000, 100000, 1000000 headers" you can use to check out groups with 10-50 million posts which would be a very bad idea to download completely.
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Re: Giganews Usage

Post by Xatrei »

Since I started using NewsLeecher + SuperSearch, the number of groups that I actively monitor has shrunk to about 3. Since I check them at least every other day, usually more, header compression might save me 6 seconds per session, which is not terribly useful for me. It's a cool offering though for others that do actively monitor several large binary groups, though.
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Re: Giganews Usage

Post by Fash »

Once you go supersearch, you never go back. I can't imagine downloading headers ever again.
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Re: Giganews Usage

Post by Winnow »

Fash wrote:Once you go supersearch, you never go back. I can't imagine downloading headers ever again.
Hey, I think I was the first one using Supersearch here but I still download a handful of groups like the xbox 360 group and divx group (sometimes) that have a lot of headers. But I keep up with those as well so have never been concerned with header download speed. Even a few million headers doesn't take too long.

There's no question that Supersearch is by far the best way to find anything on the newsgroups that you are specifically searching for.
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Re: Giganews Usage

Post by Sylvus »

I still download headers when I'm interested in just seeing what's out there.

Supersearch is awesome, but I like to peruse like a specific genre of music group and see if I can get turned on to something I wasn't familiar with.
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Re: Giganews Usage

Post by Xatrei »

I was finally tempted away by 200 day retention, and switched to giganews a couple of months ago. I just checked my spam email account (the one I use for signing up for services like this) and noticed an announcement that they're increasing retention to 240. The additional storage capacity will be in place in September, and retention will expand to 240 days afterwards.

http://www.giganews.com/news/article/bi ... 0days.html
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Re: Giganews Usage

Post by Winnow »

Xatrei wrote:I was finally tempted away by 200 day retention, and switched to giganews a couple of months ago. I just checked my spam email account (the one I use for signing up for services like this) and noticed an announcement that they're increasing retention to 240. The additional storage capacity will be in place in September, and retention will expand to 240 days afterwards.

http://www.giganews.com/news/article/bi ... 0days.html
Yeah, I didn't post it because I've posted just about every other Newsleecher/Giganews announcement. : )

Newsleecher/Supersearch needs to expand from 200 to 240 days or it won't matter much except for individual group header downloading. I'm sure Spiral will get that done though.

Supersearch does skimp on image files though with only a month or so saved. That may only be with pr0n searches though. I just did a search for "galaxy" to test for images and found some 120 days old on the non pr0n search, 74 days on the pr0n side so it looks like he's trying to catch up with images. They're far less important than videos, mp3's etc.
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Re: Giganews Usage

Post by Winnow »

Dear Valued Giganews Member,

We’ve dropped a few hints about how fast Giganews retention is growing – but now we want you to be the first to hear the biggest news yet. You will soon see 365 days of retention! That’s a full year of content waiting to be discovered.

It’s a great time to be with Giganews:

You get more time to find and download great content -- we’re adding another day of retention every single day
Soon you’ll get a full 365 days of retention, something that doesn’t exist anywhere else
We want you to have the best possible Usenet experience – so we’ll keep delivering quality and features you can’t find anywhere else. Check our website daily to watch us reach this new milestone in Usenet history.

Best regards,
Giganews Team
Weeeee full year retention.

Now Newsleecher needs to get with it and extend Supersearch.


There's been a ton of spam on newsgroups lately. I think Spiral is working on filters to help with it.
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Re: Giganews Usage

Post by Xatrei »

I don't believe it. 6 months after 240 day retention went active, several groups I monitor still don't have more than 200 days retained.
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Re: Giganews Usage

Post by Winnow »

Xatrei wrote:I don't believe it. 6 months after 240 day retention went active, several groups I monitor still don't have more than 200 days retained.
yeah, im not sure either, then again, I dont load many full groups. I mostly use Supersearch or use "load last 10,000, 100,000, 1,000,000" header options if large group.

This mostly only useful if Supersearch updated which I know there were plans to do before this spam wave.
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Re: Giganews Usage

Post by Xatrei »

Supposedly, they way they built the backend of supersearch is the bottleneck now, and once that's corrected, the new supersearch will be able to scale with whatever retention giganews has. I mostly use search, but I do load a handful of groups so that I don't have to constantly hit the supernews servers with queries returning huge result sets. I tend to find myself wondering about one thing or another and looking for relevant e-books, for example, so I just keep the a.b.e-book hierarchy updated that way I can just browse through stuff. I set supernews to retain headers for 240 days, but in those groups (and several a few others I've noticed), they peter out at ~203 days.

If they actually move up to 365 days, I'll be pretty happy, but I'm not holding my breath given the underwhelming "240 day" retention.
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Re: Giganews Usage

Post by Winnow »

Xatrei wrote:I tend to find myself wondering about one thing or another and looking for relevant e-books, for example, so I just keep the a.b.e-book hierarchy updated that way I can just browse through stuff.
I do browse some groups. A few Image groups and of course the DCP comics group but sometimes I'll browse a DIVX newsgroup when Im looking for something random to watch. That's how I found a lot of the foreign films I've seen and commented on here. The same goes for audio books sometimes.

The extra retention is nice but mostly the stuff I search for, new games, apps, movies, etc are well within the 200 days already. It's always nice to be able to go back and grab the random thing though, especially for music.
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Re: Giganews Usage

Post by valryte »

Looks like I'll be passing the 1TB mark for this month lol.
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Re: Giganews Usage

Post by Fairweather Pure »

valryte wrote:Looks like I'll be passing the 1TB mark for this month lol.
I did 1.2T one month and since then I've never gone over 200G. I kind of DLed everything I wanted from the past during that first month and all I do is simply stay on top of things now. I'm also at my PC less than I have ever been in the past decade.

Get at least 1.5T and I'll be impressed!
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Re: Giganews Usage

Post by Aslanna »

Not to mention Comcast laid the smackdown on you!
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Re: Giganews Usage

Post by Funkmasterr »

I have no idea, unless you are using it for a small business too, how you could use that much in a month.

I thought I had a lot of music/movies/games/etc on my hard drive and I've only got like 300-350 GB total. I'm really curious what you do with all that bandwidth, do you feel the need to download every single movie that comes out every week and every one in the past you've been remotely interested in? I guess I've never payed attention to how much bandwidth can be used by playing games online, so I'm not sure how big of a factor that could play.
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Re: Giganews Usage

Post by Fairweather Pure »

Aslanna wrote:Not to mention Comcast laid the smackdown on you!
Inconsequential! My DLing took a natural decline!
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Re: Giganews Usage

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Funkmasterr wrote:I have no idea, unless you are using it for a small business too, how you could use that much in a month.

I thought I had a lot of music/movies/games/etc on my hard drive and I've only got like 300-350 GB total. I'm really curious what you do with all that bandwidth, do you feel the need to download every single movie that comes out every week and every one in the past you've been remotely interested in? I guess I've never payed attention to how much bandwidth can be used by playing games online, so I'm not sure how big of a factor that could play.
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Post by Funkmasterr »

Fairweather Pure wrote:
Funkmasterr wrote:I have no idea, unless you are using it for a small business too, how you could use that much in a month.

I thought I had a lot of music/movies/games/etc on my hard drive and I've only got like 300-350 GB total. I'm really curious what you do with all that bandwidth, do you feel the need to download every single movie that comes out every week and every one in the past you've been remotely interested in? I guess I've never payed attention to how much bandwidth can be used by playing games online, so I'm not sure how big of a factor that could play.
If I DLed every DVD I currently own, the Internet would explode.
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Re: Giganews Usage

Post by miir »

I guess I've never payed attention to how much bandwidth can be used by playing games online, so I'm not sure how big of a factor that could play
Online gaming uses very little bandwidth... probably like a few hunded megs for a full day of TF2 or EQ2/WOW.
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Re: Giganews Usage

Post by valryte »

Get at least 1.5T and I'll be impressed!
That was just in 2 weeks, I still have another 2 weeks to go hehe.
I thought I had a lot of music/movies/games/etc on my hard drive and I've only got like 300-350 GB total.
My server is currently about 2.5TB and growing. I'll post about the setup one of these days.
I guess I've never payed attention to how much bandwidth can be used by playing games online, so I'm not sure how big of a factor that could play.
The screen shot is from Giganews, so online game play has 0 factor.
If I DLed every DVD I currently own, the Internet would explode.
Screw DVD, I'm a 1080 snob.
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Re: Giganews Usage

Post by valryte »

Ok, rotation ends tomorrow, don't think I'll be squeezing much more before then.
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Re: Giganews Usage

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It's not a competition you know!
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Re: Giganews Usage

Post by valryte »

Of course not, but I figured some of the newsgroup junkies would get a kick at seeing those crazy numbers. Btw the max I ever saw was about 7-8MB/sec.
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Re: Giganews Usage

Post by Fairweather Pure »

That is 8x more than my provider allows. To DL that much, it would now cost me 60 bucks for the first 250G, then 1 dollar every gig after that. So the total would be $1,810.00. I'm out of the competition!
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Re: Giganews Usage

Post by Winnow »

Giganews rolling along:
Giganews today became the first Usenet provider in the world to reach 900 days of newsgroups retention! Just two years ago, the best provider had 240 days of retention. That provider was Giganews.

Increasing retention by over 350% isn't easy, but we enjoy the technical challenge. More people than ever before are posting more discussions, photos, and other content to Usenet. Over the past two years, the Usenet feed has grown from 5 TB/day to 9 TB/day.

The simple solution is to add more hard disks, and we certainly added thousands of those. Giganews also heavily invests in developing our software to handle such high retention levels. We want the fastest Usenet service, so we've designed our Usenet clusters to treat all retention equally. When you download from Giganews, the day-900 article downloads just as fast as yesterday's article. Our software makes this possible by spreading our newsgroup articles around and finding the fastest, best-performing source on our worldwide cluster. While some might try to match our retention, none matches our speed or reliability.

So please, enjoy the 900 days (and growing) of newsgroups retention we offer. As Usenet continues to grow, we'll continue to focus on providing the best access available.
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Re: Giganews Usage

Post by Xatrei »

I had noticed their retention creeping up to around 900, and was wondering when they'd make an announcement.

This reminds me, does anyone use a service other than giganews with a retention of greater than 1 year? I'm after something that is borked on giganews, but was apparently good on other servers at the time that it was posted (a pdf only 11-ish MB).
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Re: Giganews Usage

Post by miir »

usenetserver.com is up to 800 now.
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Re: Giganews Usage

Post by Aslanna »

I use Agent news which I think is 500 now (600 if using NZB). And they include SSL for free. I have a fried that likes Astralweb and I think it's even cheaper. Giganews is overpriced.
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Re: Giganews Usage

Post by Winnow »

Money is no object!

I actually lowered my Giganews to the Silver plan which is 50GB/month...a few days ago I ran out of GB with ten day s left in the month cycle. You can always renew instantly your month cycle. 15.00 vs 25.00 unlimited....with the PS3 hacked again for new games I decided unlimited was a good option for a little while (considering PS3 and it's bloated games)...very easy to switch back and forth and Giganews keeps things very accurate. After PS3 things die down again, I'll probably switch back to 15.month again for 50GB...not a big deal if you go over...you really cant go over, it shuts you off with easy auto recycle option avail or just log on and renew or switch plan.

Giganews...accept no substitute!
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Re: Giganews Usage

Post by Winnow »

I hit my 50GB S15.00/month Silver Giganews plan 8 days before the monthly cycle. Luckily there's a free 60 day Diamond (unlimited, risk free) trial available so I just accepted that and kept on leeching. I must say it's extremely easy to upgrade/downgrade your service plan with giganews. Hassle free.

Newsleecher is still a great deal at $2.99/month (Supersearch plus any new versions of Newsleecher)

I also checked my lifetime leech totals and I'm only at 5.6 TB since 2005. Not that much when you consider Fairwheather went nuts and grabbed 1.2TB in a month.

Lately I've been downloading HD TV series which has been sucking up quite a bit of data and also had a run on a few good 360 ISOs which adds up quick.



Some quotes from 2005 on this thread:

Winnow wrote:Giganews comes highly recommended by me. Fast, 50 day retention, and unlimited.
It's now 1,598 days retention!
Aslanna wrote:Leech now while you can! I forsee news providers getting a few lawsuits in the future. Only takes 1-2 for all the providers to get scared and pull binaries.
almost 8 years later, still leeching!
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Re: Giganews Usage

Post by Funkmasterr »

I've seen a few of my friends bitching on facebook that newsgroups they used were shut down by force recently. Can't remember which they used.
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Re: Giganews Usage

Post by Winnow »

Funkmasterr wrote:I've seen a few of my friends bitching on facebook that newsgroups they used were shut down by force recently. Can't remember which they used.
inconceivable!

I'm testing out Dump Truck which is offered as part of the Giganews Services. It's like Dropbox, Skydrive, etc but there are no file size limits and no bandwidth limits

5Gb with any Giganews account, 30GB with a Diamond account.
Store Any File Size: Upload or download any file size to Dump Truck. Every Dump Truck account includes support for unlimited file sizes.

Unlimited Transfer Speeds: Golden Frog doesn't throttle upload or download speed. Experience unlimited speed when transferring any size file to Dump Truck.

Share Any File Size: Share any file size with family and friends. Whether it is a long family video or large document, Golden Frog never limits sharing based on file size.
It's pretty no frills but allows public/private link sharing for your files. I'm going to see how well it works sharing a movie size file with a friend (rar/encrypted of course) I don't like any of the other cloud storage offerings when it comes to large files (250MB+). I do like to share large files from time to time with family or friends so this might work out.

What would be really cool is if you could save from the Newsgroups directly to Dump Truck, saving the long upload times from your own PC.
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Re: Giganews Usage

Post by Xatrei »

I assume his friends are talking about nzb indexes like Newzbin2 and NZBMatrix that have had to close up shop due to dmca demands.
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Re: Giganews Usage

Post by Funkmasterr »

I just checked, and xatrei is correct. I had just kinda skimmed over the post when I saw it originally.
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Re: Giganews Usage

Post by Winnow »

After many years I switched from Giganews to Astraweb.

http://www.astraweb.com/

Astraweb is one of the few services that runs their own news servers and has a good completion percentage.

The main reason I switched is because my newsgroup habits have become pretty varied when it comes to how much I download each month. Astraweb offers a payment option where you pay for a set about for a number of GBs and can keep it until you use it.

So, for example. I initially tried out the service buying 180 GB for $25.00. I'm still using it That's the same or less than I paid monthly for the top tier Giganews monthly unlimited service but I probably only download like 60GB a month these days. Whenever you run out of GB's you can just buy more.

Here's the breakdown

25 GB for $10.00 (poor choice)
180 GB for $25.00 (Not bad at all even if you download quite a bit)
1000 GB for $50.00 (great deal)

(there are also traditional monthly fee options but the above works much better unless you really download a ton which most of you can't due to ISP bandwidth limitations)

I'll pick up 1 TB for $50.00 whenever I run out of my 180GB and it should last me qat least 6 months which saves me ass tons of cash ($180.00 Giganews) It may even last a year (unless certain consoles get hacked!) which would be $50.00 vs $360.00+

I get 90+ Mbps on my downloads consistently and 100+ often so there's no issue with download speeds. You can still have lots of connections and retention is 4-5 years. They have US and Euro serverfarms. They take Paypal which is always a plus so you don't have to dish out your CC number to another company if you have a Paypal account which you should...even Best Buy/Newegg, etc take Paypal now.

I really like the pay for GB plan. with 1 TB for $50.00, you won't feel like you're wasting money in a slow download month and you don't lose your allotted GB's ever until you use them.
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Re: Giganews Usage

Post by Winnow »

I wanted to follow up on my Astra Web usenet experience because it's been outstanding. Per my above post, I switched from giganews to Astraweb and decided to try out the option to pay for a set amount of GB. I decided to try the $25.00 for 180GB option.

So far I've used like 225 GB and the 180 GB plan service is still active. I don't know how they measure bandwidth but it only seems to register a little more than half of what I download.

Paying for set GB is a great way to go if you download less than 1 TB a month (looking at you Fair). I plan to pay $50 for 1 TB whenever this first 180 GB runs out. Astra Web has been fast and reliable and seems to have one of the best group retention rates. Better than giganews at least.
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Re: Giganews Usage

Post by Aslanna »

Retention isn't really a problem. It's all the DMCA shenanigans. 1600 day retention does you no good if posts are nuked in less than a day. If you keep up on things you can usually get what you need but using it as 'backup' isn't the best solution depending on what the items are.
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Re: Giganews Usage

Post by Winnow »

Aslanna wrote:Retention isn't really a problem. It's all the DMCA shenanigans. 1600 day retention does you no good if posts are nuked in less than a day. If you keep up on things you can usually get what you need but using it as 'backup' isn't the best solution depending on what the items are.
Yeah, you still get that with Astra Web but I've been able to find what I want. It takes a little digging sometimes but that will be the same for all usenet providers. As long as you're using a quality newapp like Newsleecher that detects rar-n-rar scams etc, and using common sense, it's not that hard to find stuff. Astra Web is one of a very few stand alone usenet providers that doesn't buy their access from another source.

Lately I've been getting a lot of TV shows etc from the RS log blogs. I subscribe to one of the more popular download services and am able to grab new shows/movies quickly that way so my newgroups usage varies wildly but mostly less than I used to used it.

What I like about Astra Web and the set amount of GB for $ is that it doesn't matter how much I use usenet. I'm not wasting money as long as I eventually use the GB's I bought which don't expire. 1 TB for $50 is going to last me a long long time. Probably a year or more unless one of the new consoles gets hacked. I was paying $360/year with giganews and I used less than 2 TB in over 5 years. For low usenet users. $50 for 1 TB is like buying lifetime access to the usenet for a one time fee. I do pay 2.99/month for newsleecher/supersearch still as its the best newsreader and still updated on a regular basis and great search.
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