Six months ago, Giganews announced that it would expand its server capacity to 365 days of retention. It passed that barrier some time ago, and just yesterday reached the magical 400-day mark. In plain English, that means if someone posted Some File to alt.binaries.boneless back in July, 2008, you should be able to find it on Giganews’ servers. And to think, back in my early days of Usenet use (2001ish), I was putting up with two days retention.
And of course, it’s not just files on Usenet; there’s a great deal of discussion on there, some of which is actually useful! (Note: Reading anything in the alt.politics.* hierarchy may well drive you crazy.) I used to read comp.sys.mac back in high school to better understand the operating system that I was just beginning to use.
Discussion groups aside, yeah, you can “find things” on Usenet before you find them anywhere else. I’m currently using SABnzbd, and it completely maxes out my Internet connection, which, you’ll recall, is pretty fast!
So congrats to the guys and gals at Giganews for crossing the 400-day mark. I’ve also been told that they’re not going to arbitrarily stop at 400 days, either, so keep your eyes on their Web site to see the day’s current retention.