Giganews (aff) which is in my opinion the best Usenet provider on the planet did it once again and upgraded their storage capacities to increase the retention of the Usenet files to 120 days. If you compare that to the retention level of other Usenet providers who sometimes offer a binary retention of 5-7 days you know the difference. If you never heard about the Usenet before let me give you a rough understanding of what it actually is.
A Usenet provider like Giganews gives you access to the Usenet which is basically a discussion platform where users can also post binaries. The binaries make the Usenet so attractive to everyone who feels that P2P is not safe anymore. Giganews offers SSL encryption which means that your Internet Service Provider does not know what you are exchanging with Giganews. If you want to get an impression of what the Usenet generally has to offer you might want to take a look at Newzbin and Binsearch. Those two sites are Usenet indexing sites that have records on many files that get posted day in day out on the Usenet.
Retention on the other hand is not everything. What good is a retention of 120 days if the files are all incomplete and useless to you ? Thankfully Giganews has a very high standard and offers more than 99% file completion which is a great figure for the Usenet. The speed is excellent as well, I can fully use my 16 Mbit connection and get 1.8 Megabytes per second using the encrypted connection to Giganews.
You do need a so called news reader software to be able to connect to the servers and download files to your computer. I’m using the commercial software Newsbin which is excellent. Grabit is a free alternative.
I have written a longer post in the past that gives you additional information, take a look why Giganews is the ultimate P2P Alternative.
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[...] Martin quite rightly says that Giganews is “…the best Usenet provider on the planet…”. Not only does Giganews’ huge 120 day retention shame other Usenet services who tend to only provide 5-7 days retention, but the completion rate is virtually 100%. [...]