I run an online backup service at work, and we talk about our storage requirements in Petabytes not Terabytes now, and that’s a lot of storage. I can’t imagine how much storage Giganews must have in order to deliver 240 days retention which they’ve just announced. The number of files shared via Usenet must be astronomical now, when you consider that large HD DVDs and videos and lossless music are now available.
I just checked one of the popular groups for films and music alt.binaries.boneless, and over the last 200 days over 500 million headers were created. If all the posts were mp3s then that would be nearly 3 Petabytes of storage, and given that some of the posts could be bigger video files, I reckon this group alone has over 20PBs of data in it. Giganews has over 100,000 newsgroups now, so I’m not even going to attempt to estimate how much data they are storing.
If you want to try Usenet out then I’d recommend using Giganews as they are by far the best provider in terms of newsgroups coverage, retention, completion rates and provide the best download speeds. To give Giganews a try or to just learn more, click here.
