LW uploads are being uploaded to newsgroups for backup purposes.
Click HERE and HERE for an introduction to Usenet.
Click HERE to find the NZBs.
Introduction & background
In a 2016 post, Shattered outlined the possibility of using newsgroups to back up our uploads. His test upload from September 2010 can be found here for reference.
The outstanding benefit of newsgroups is their retention, meaning how long the files remain available on the servers. Unlike cyberlockers, files posted on newsgroups do not "expire" depending on their popularity; and nowadays, many providers reach 3000+ days of retention, meaning you can access files posted 8 years ago --provided they haven't been DMCA'd meanwhile-- and that files uploaded now should remain available for the next 8 years --provided they aren't DMCA'd in the meantime--. Binary retention is still growing for most of the providers, on a daily basis.
What I'm looking forward to is to provide a mirror for all LW uploads - from the oldass early 2000s Rips to the latest ISOs.
The main downsides
Because it can't be perfect.
- First major disappointment: Subscribing for a good Usenet access is not free. However it is usually very cheap. If you are a humble downloader, looking for a few MBs there and there, a free trial at a major provider will leave you satisfied. If you need to leech some terabytes off newsgroups, a paying subscription is probably what you'll need.
- Second drawback: all files meant to be backed up for LW2Usenet are repacked and passworded before they are posted to newsgroups. This implies that double-packed scene releases, for example, become triple-packed, hence you will sometimes get files insides archives inside archives inside archives, à la matrioshka.
This also means that in order to get a specific file inside these encrypted archives, you need to download the whole set of archives. E.g, you want rld-btaa.r60 from the scene release of Arkham Asylum? It's only 95MB, but you'll need to download the whole 8GB set and decompress it to do so. Which brings us to the third part:
What's the point then?
Providing a long-term, last-chance backup for uploaders, and a viable option for everyday downloaders.
In other words, if you are an uploader, this mirror will likely be useful for you in case you are unable to locate the files from your original upload.
If you are a downloader, chances are that you chose to download off Usenet because the original upload was broken in some way and you are looking for an alternative before the upload is officially fixed.
Modus operandi
Files downloaded off LW will be packed into 200MB archives and uploaded to alt.binaries.archive.encrypted - with 10% recovery volume.
If the original download is broken or misses files, I upload a replacement instead when possible, e.g when it's a scene release or something easy to find - otherwise all I can do is skip it, report it and process it later if a reupload happens.
There are two movements to this leeching process. The first part consists in mirroring the uploads #1 to #9999. In the meantime, I'm also processing uploads starting from #10000 in the hopes of catching up the latest uploads (#14100 and so on as I'm writing this).
Stats
![Image](https://i.ibb.co/0yN7hvZ/Screenshot-2022-12-22-at-14-21-43-Origen-ISO.png)