Deep Retention Update June 2024, the Backbone Situation

Since I last posted about retention, things have changed slightly. There 
are fewer resellers on the Omicron backbone and no block accounts. It is 
still the best backbone for older material. The Omicron event horizon has 
moved about just one week ahead from August 8th 2008 to August 16th 2008. 
There are headers for files on the 14th and 15th but the files themselves 
are gone. It feels like like Omicron lost the hard drive in their network 
with the oldest files on it. The next most common backbone, Usenet 
Express, does not have a fixed date for retention start and it's 
approximately 2900 days of retention is far from their stated retention 
of 4000+ days. Those 2900 days are not being increased and older files 
get deleted every month. Usenet Express also deletes files that don't get 
downloaded often so it's not a good backbone for searching for old and 
rare files. The Abavia backbone has varied retention according to 
provider. The maximum retention on this backbone is around 3600 days but 
most providers seem to have around 2900 days of actual binary retention. 
I have 3 different Abavia accounts and all of them index back to July 
2014 but none of the older files download. There are some Abavia 
providers that claim 3400 to 3800 days retention but they are all fairly 
expensive monthly subscription only providers and I already pay enough 
for Usenet subscriptions. In any case, Abavia has some advantages other 
than retention. It carries groups that the other backbones don't and 
Abavia providers in general allow posting without having to request it, 
at least on subscription accounts, and there are lots of cheap providers 
on this backbone. If you shop around, you can get low bandwidth account 
for around 20 euros per year. The Usenet Farm backbone has about 1000 
days retention as does the Netnews backbone that Blocknews and Frugal 
Usenet are using after being kicked off Omicron. So if you were using 
Blocknews to get older files, the only option now is a subscription 
account on an Omicron provider with Newshosting and Eweka being the best 
and most secure options. I currently have subscriptions to both just 
because I do a lot of deep indexing and I don't want to mess around 
provider wise. I have a terabyte or so of Blocknews blocks and they're 
really only good for posting these days. Blocknews has always been cool 
with posting and I found I can post to the Abavia only groups with it 
even though their new backbone doesn't carry them. Weird, but at least my 
blocks are still good for something. The Abavia only groups are a cool 
discovery. They're like the phantom groups that only Abavia users can see 
but invisible to most of the rest of Usenet and not indexed anywhere on 
the web. I've done some test posting to one, alt.binaries.comics.classic. 
My newsreader had some old posts indexed on it but I could never post to 
it before and I thought it was slated for deletion and the servers had 
locked posting on it. If you've got Abavia, you can see them. 

So, the backbone and provider situation for getting older files is not as 
good as it was a few years ago but you can still get all of them with an 
Omicron provider. Due to all the encrypted and obfuscated posting, the 
whole Usenet feed is growing exponentially and getting more costly to 
maintain so I don't know how long the 2008 retention is going to last. 
One thing in it's favor is that it probably costs a lot less to keep 
storing the old posts than keep up with the new ones. Groups like 
alt.binaries.boneless have gigabytes of uploads daily and most of it is 
obfuscated. Keeping the older material might give Omicron enough of a 
competitive advantage to make it worthwhile. If they didn't, they'd be 
just like all the other providers.


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PX=Paradox