Usenet Retention

5,859 days of binary retention

Available on every unlimited plan and every block account — and growing by a day, every day.

  • 100 connections
  • 4 Usenet backbones
  • 30 day money-back guarantee
  • Free SSL on every plan

Retention is the single number most people use to compare Usenet providers, and it is the one most often misunderstood. It is the number of days an article stays on the servers before it ages out of the spool. At NewsgroupDirect that window is currently 5,859 days, and because articles are not expired it grows by another day with every day that passes.

What the number does and does not tell you

A retention figure describes the age of the oldest article a provider still holds. It does not promise that every post from that far back is complete. Individual articles go missing for ordinary reasons — a takedown notice, a propagation gap between backbones, or an upload that was never finished by the person who posted it. That is what completion rate measures, and it is why posters publish PAR2 recovery blocks alongside a release.

The practical answer is to treat retention as a necessary condition rather than a sufficient one. A post older than a provider's retention window cannot be downloaded from that provider at all. A post inside the window usually can be, and parity data covers the gaps.

Retention across four backbones

Our multi-backbone plans bundle the NewsgroupDirect, Supernews, ViperNews and Usenet.Farm backbones. Where one backbone has lost segments of an older post, another may still carry them, which does more for a difficult old download than a larger retention number on a single backbone would. Block accounts read from the same servers as subscriptions, so the retention figure above applies to them too.

Current binary and text retention figures are always published on our network status page.

Related terms

Retention FAQs

Binary retention is currently up to 5,859 days, and it applies to every unlimited subscription plan and every block account. There is no cheaper tier with shorter retention - the figure is the same whichever plan you are on.
Retention is the number of days a Usenet article stays available on a provider's servers before it ages out of the spool. A provider quoting a large number is telling you how far back the oldest article it still holds goes, not that every single post from that period survives intact.
Yes. Articles are not expired, so the window extends by one more day for every day that passes. The number published on this page is recalculated on each page load rather than being updated by hand, so it is always current.
Yes. Blocks and unlimited subscriptions read from the same servers and therefore have the same retention. Blocks also have no expiry date, so data you buy today can still be spent against posts years from now.
No, and any provider claiming otherwise is overselling. Retention tells you an article is old enough to still be in range; completion rate tells you whether every segment of that particular post is actually present. Old posts can be missing segments because of takedown notices, propagation gaps, or an upload that was incomplete to begin with. PAR2 recovery blocks exist to repair exactly that kind of partial loss.
They are measured separately. Binary retention covers the posts that carry files and is the figure quoted on this page. Text retention covers plain discussion articles, which are far smaller and are usually kept for longer. Both current figures are published on our network status page.

5,859 days of retention on every plan we sell

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