Usenet retention: the longest retention worldwide

Retention time – the yardstick for all Usenet providers

Retention time is an important quality and decision-making factor when it comes to finding the right Usenet provider. It provides information on how long a message or a file remains available in the newsgroups and/or is saved there. A long retention time therefore means that content can be found, read and downloaded for longer in the Usenet. The Usenet providers are, of course, competing with one another and attempt to offer as much retention time as possible. USENEXT customers enjoy a convenient service in this respect. Binary files are now available to our customers for 6,600+ days – more than 18 years. After all, there is good reason why USENEXT is considered to be one of the world's top Usenet providers. Customer satisfaction, service and quality always come first!

About USENEXT Newsgroups

6,600+

days of retention

über 18

years still available

30.000+

terabytes of content

200.000+

forums to search

What is retention time?

Retention time is the period for which a post stays stored on a Usenet provider’s servers and can still be downloaded. It is measured in days and counts as the single most important figure for the quality of a Usenet access. Once a post is older than the retention time, it can no longer be retrieved.

Text retention

Plain text posts take up hardly any storage, which is why they stay available especially long – at USENEXT since our start in 2004.

Binary retention

Posts with file attachments take up many times the storage. This is the figure that decides how far back you can really go – at USENEXT it is 6,600+ days.

The longest retention worldwide

No other Usenet provider keeps posts available longer than USENEXT: 6,600+ days, which is more than 18 years. In practice that means anything posted to the Usenet in 2008 can still be found today.

That figure has grown over the years. Since our start in 2004 we have extended retention step by step: to 1,000 days in 2011, to 2,013 days in 2013, and to 6,600+ days today. The chart further down shows how text and file attachments developed.

What you need a long retention for

Finding older content

Series, software and archives posted years ago are long gone where retention is short.

Filling in missing parts

If segments are missing from a download, they can only be fetched later while the postings are still being kept. With USENEXT they are missing less often to begin with: as the only provider worldwide we use two backbones, Omicron and Abavia, which cover each other’s gaps.

Researching the archive

The Usenet is one of the oldest discussion archives on the net. The longer the retention, the more of it stays readable.

No time pressure

You do not have to download the moment you find something. With more than 18 years of retention there is time.

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Development of USENEXT retention times

During the relatively short history of USENEXT, we have not only changed the volume plans significantly, we have also improved the retention times considerably. The graph below shows the development of the retention time for text and file attachments since we launched in 2004. While binaries were available for just two months in the early years, they are now saved for more than 17 years.

More about the history of USENEXT