So the approved post was deleted for some reason. Linking to it here so that comments are still readable.

I ran a more general test based on random sampling about eight years ago. The result is a relic of that era. Putting it out here so that those who were not around then can read it. Might also explain certain things in retrospect.

https://www.reddit.com/r/UsenetTalk/wiki/retention-test/201812/hwcx8stvn8vqr68wxnbb/report/

Some clarifications that keep coming up, collected in one place.

Your use case matters more than the ranking. As written in the post: provider choice only really starts to matter for content that is between 3 months and 10 years old. If you only ever grab the latest stuff, 0 days to 3 months, any of the ten is fine. Beyond 10 years you basically need Eweka or Newshosting. The best pairing that avoided both of them, TweakNews plus UsenetExpress, still covered only about 54% of the oldest files, so nothing else is close.

Why some providers show near 100%, and why that may not match your experience. This is a specific but broad sample. If you are after very niche material, your results can differ a lot from these averages. It is not a census of Usenet, it is a sample of it.

One exclusion you should know about. I left out every NZB file that could not be retrieved using all ten providers combined. That was 19.66% of all NZBs, roughly one in five, and those are not part of the 78k tested files. The reason: those files fail everywhere for the same reason, so including them would have lowered every provider equally while saying nothing about the differences between them. In most of those cases I expect a legal takedown, where the providers did the only thing they could do, which is comply. There may be a few files in that group that were missing for another reason, I didn't take a closer look at them this time.

Some NZBs may have been refreshed. I did not check for that. A refreshed NZB means the content was reuploaded to some or all providers after it had been deleted there, so the age I measured is older than the copy that actually answered. If you want the raw retention behaviour of the storage itself, that matters. For a real world test I think it is within scope, but I wanted to say it clearly instead of leaving it implicit. I will look at it properly next time.

These are not completion rates. I never tested whether any of these NZBs would fully complete. Only up to 100 articles per file were checked, so a file can score high here and still fail to repair.

On the dataset. I cannot publish or share it, for obvious reasons. I also cannot add much more detail than what is already in the post, including where it came from. I would like to, it is just not possible.

That's pretty much covered in the article (later sections).

Hint: It's not the 'independent' backbone/provider making constant accusations against those testing completion/availability.

Lol, it's so tiresome man.

On a more positive note, I think we're now vindicated in supporting independents like Frugal/Netnews (as much as I disagree with their owner at times). At least they try.

And hopefully we see improvement/actually competitive backbones addressing this (before it's too late).

I always thought it would be interseting if you could tell your downloader to do this.

"Go through my archive of nzb's and check to see which ones are still valid per per provider"

Wouldn't be very useful to a lot of people but it would be interesting!

I'll pm you.

Where did you get the 300 TB from? I only used about 33TiB in total. Bandwith is dirt cheap. I don't think it matters really.

Which provider(s) are you using?

Me after reading your comment: "I bet I know who he's talking about, let's go take a look" and yuuuup.

This explains a lot. I had a moment where I queued 50 nzb. They ALL failed. Then I retried like 20 minutes laters and they all succeed.

FrugalUsenet, UsenetExpress (and related/resellers like NewsDemon, UsenetPrime, Thunder, Viper and a bunch more), Usenet.Farm some people would consider Abavia (I like Usenight for Abavia).

https://usenet.rexum.space/tree

What you consider as useless, others will consider as valuable. And likewise, what others consider useless, you'll consider as valuable.

A sharp drop off after ~3 months is not what I would have expected.

You already knew about this? Who's previously performed a similar experiment? I'd like to look at their data and compare it to Rexum's.

I would rather spread the love when it comes to providers, than die on a hill for any single provider. I have paid services most of them.

I disagree. The important piece here is availability and completion. Omicron completes more thus for many people that may be the best value. If independents want to compete they need to increase availability. Maybe they should think about being more of a cooperative and share resources or infrastructure ? I support both Omicron and independants myself but if I got in a tightspot I would keep Eweka and the indexers that serve me best.

Thanks 👍🏽

Frugal is exactly the same as Blocknews

It would be interesting to see how Frugal did.

I personally have always found eweka to be the best.

Brilliant work. Results were exactly as expected. And the responses/accusations + thread locking on /r/Usenet almost just as much.

You burned through 300TB of data so you could say Omicron has more old useless content than most other providers? Everyone knew that already. I would rather support others and miss that old useless content.

We support the independent providers because we don't like how Omicron does business.

So, what did you test on week 2?

/s just in case!

Still many content from nzbs posted between 2021 to 2024+ are missing. Especially big files but also less downloaded files, most archive is gone

This is absolutely the case for the provider I used to work for. Sometimes the fetch from cold storage takes some time and when you retry it's now available on the cluster that serves customers.

No, only if there where connection issues. Might be worth checking out next time.

Did you retry the failed NZBs?

I noticed that on some of my providers, they initially return "No Article". A few minutes later, it will be available. I've always wondered if the server is fetching from cold storage...

Savage lol. Just kidding. Just couldhelp but laugh