I have never used NewsDemon so I have no experience to comment on their service.
I do have a question, they state their retention is 5,854+ days, great.
One of the ones I use is Eweka, they provide over 6,575 days of binary and text article retention, yada yada.
It's a game of my retention is bigger than yours to lure in customers ... anyway:
What they all fail to mention is, how much of those days are complete?
NewsDemon states: ~516TB New Articles Ingested Yesterday <- that is insane and financially impossible to keep forever.
Usenet keeps growing as the number of indexers, forums, bots uploading shit keeps increasing, on top of the massive number of scene and p2p releases in every single format for every single tv-show, movie etc.
I can safely say that I have downloaded files from usenet that are 6000+ days old and they work fine. Not everything I find an NZB for will work.
Some things got DMCA / NTD (normal take down) and I guess some things just didn't get saved.
Where am I going with this?
If you have used usenet for a while you would have come across the issue that releases uploaded between ~2020- ~2024 are very often failing to download (I shall call it "the gap" from here onwards).
Depending on how many times and how recent they have been downloaded, you will very often fail to download them. They have been deleted.
Why? My theory is that nobody can store 500+ TB of new data every day, forever.
All files on usenet from 2009 would be smaller than a single day in 2026.
So keeping files from back then does not require many new drives every single day.
"The gap" in usenet is expanding both ways.
There's very little talk on reddit about this because all the usenet bot accounts mass downvote you and posts are deleted when you talk about this.
"The gap" is real, files are being deleted and the timeframe ~2020- ~2024 is expanding in both directions.
Part of the issue is that most stuff before ~2013 was just uploaded to usenet without obfuscation.
On Usenet, obfuscation means scrambling file names and subject lines into random text to hide what is being uploaded. This stops ANYONE from seeing what you uploaded, unless you have the .NZB to link it all together.
Since obfuscation started, all the usenet backbones see is random garbage, most of it never downloaded again, so they would start deleting to make space.
Combine this with cross-posting and your files are a random bunch of garbage spread across multiple groups.
So in the end, what are you trying to achieve with 5800+ days of retention?
If you sometimes want to download something old, it should be ok.
If you are actively trying to download LOTS of stuff thats a few years old, you may be very disappointed if all the releases you want are in "the gap".
If you want to compare usenet servers (backbone, takedown info etc) you should check out
Unless you have enough servers that cover every single backbone, you will always run into releases that fail to download. But this is financially unviable, unless you are VERY rich.
