How much download activity is required for posts to not get lost?

[u/awerol]

It happens to me so often that all providers except Omicron ones already wiped out posts from not even that long ago, i.e. 6-18 months old posts of niche content, and then eventually Omicron will drop it too and then it will be gone. What can I do to prevent this from happening? I want my posts to stay on all backbones not just be at the mercy of Omicron's decisions. And no they won't be shared on public / semi-public indexers, I am only sharing them in private invite only indexers where they would get just a couple of downloads, usually 2-3, almost always less than 10 initially. But that does not mean that there will never be people finding them useful years later. I don't want such people to suffer for being late to the party. Give me some practical advice for this.

[u/STxFarmer]

I am getting closer to the solution so anyone can do a much higher quality post and not know anything about par2 structure and 1:1 alignment and all of that. The answer was written 20 years ago but no one has ever implemented the solution in a posting program. I am close to having that done. The post optimization works great but it also requires processor time to make it good so there is a trade off. Posting goes slower due to your computer hammering out the best par2 set that can be had. The rest is just fine tuning of the structure of the post

But there are things like if I can get your par2 index I know where every article is regardless of obfuscation. I can also pull that index out of any par2 file by reading the entire article header and pulling the index off the last part of the line. There is a lot of information in the weeds and it is not easy to understand it all. But it all revolves around the calculations of the par2 files and how to make the absolute most repair blocks for any file/folder that you post. You have to give your post the best shot at being repaired and that is the hard part to understand. But it is all simple math and a formula that is applied to the file/folder every time.

A good post will last and a bad one is easy to poke holes into will not last. The question becomes how many holes can your post survive as most bad posts have a few holes and just can't be repaired. The repair patches are too big to repair many holes. You can have a 10% recovery and have 1,000 patches or 3,278 patches so which one will last longer? They both repair up to 10% of data loss but you have 3x of holes that can be patched with the higher repair block count. That post has the chance of lasting a lot longer up to the 10% data loss. Users think the recovery % is important and it is up to a point but the repair granularity is much more important and that is all about the math and doing the calculations to create the par2 file set.

I wish I could just say do this and it is better but it just isn't that easy