Getting a lot of Repair failed, not enough repair blocks

[bozrdang]

I am new to NZBs and Usenet and I'm having a fair bit of trouble downloading things. I get a lot of "Repair failed, not enough repair blocks" errors. I'm not sure how much of this is to be expected, but it seems far too often to me. For example, I tried to download 13 episodes of Friday Night Lights and 6 failed. Today I downloaded 6 episodes of Dark Blue and 1 failed. I've probably downloaded a total of 50 good episodes and 20 failed ones. I think I have had at least 1 failed download for every series where I've downloaded at least 5-6 episodes. Surely this isn't the norm. I almost never got bad Torrent downloads and I figured Usenet would be at least as good. This leads me to believe something is wrong and it's probably on my end since I'm so new to this. What can I do about it?

I use NZB Matrix with AstraWeb as my provider. CouchPotato gets the NZBs for me and I'm running SABnzbd 0.6.10 on WIn 7 with the Plush skin.

Here is a section of the log with a failed episode: http://paste2.org/p/1770399

[shypike]

You have to come up with a convincing story that this is indeed a SABnzbd problem.
Like being able to repair using QuickPar (Windows-only).
Or successful download with an alternative program.
Did you check comments on nzbmatrix.com ?
Usenet is inherently unreliable and it has become more so in the last year.

[bozrdang]

I'm not saying it's a SABnzbd problem. I don't know and I was wondering if it could be or if I may have it configured wrong. I've tried QuickPar on the few I didn't delete and it didn't fix any of them (assuming I used it properly. I just opened the main PAR2 file in it). I've never tried a different program so I guess I should try that. I don't usually get to see the comments ahead of time since CouchPotato does the automation for me, but I did go back and check the few I still have and there aren't any comments except one that said "thanks".

I didn't realize that Usenet was unreliable. From listening to everybody for the last couple years, all I heard was how great it was. I can see how it can be great, but if these are indeed incomplete files and not problems unique to me, then it also seems to be a bit of fool's gold in that what you see isn't necessarily what you get. Nonetheless, that's not your fault or problem. I'm just trying to sort this out is all. Thanks for your feedback.

[ne0rmatrix]

I am new to NZBs and Usenet and I'm having a fair bit of trouble downloading things. I get a lot of "Repair failed, not enough repair blocks" errors. I'm not sure how much of this is to be expected, but it seems far too often to me. For example, I tried to download 13 episodes of Friday Night Lights and 6 failed. Today I downloaded 6 episodes of Dark Blue and 1 failed. I've probably downloaded a total of 50 good episodes and 20 failed ones. I think I have had at least 1 failed download for every series where I've downloaded at least 5-6 episodes. Surely this isn't the norm. I almost never got bad Torrent downloads and I figured Usenet would be at least as good. This leads me to believe something is wrong and it's probably on my end since I'm so new to this. What can I do about it?

I use NZB Matrix with AstraWeb as my provider. CouchPotato gets the NZBs for me and I'm running SABnzbd 0.6.10 on WIn 7 with the Plush skin.

Here is a section of the log with a failed episode: http://paste2.org/p/1770399

Ok I can say i have an issue with repair fail too. I downloaded a huge 42 GB Bluray iso, and then about 3 others about same size. Note i only have had issues with repair fail on extremely huge files with large rars, like 200MB or so. Too verify issue i redownloaded affected rars with free version of alt.binz and downloaded with no problems. Just to check i downloaded same files, at least 8 seperate files of 200MB rars and had same issue consistantly and only with those files. I have since only had issue rarely. I cannot verify this is a specific issue with my provider or with sabnzbd, but it is suspicious that i had no issues with alt.binz. I will have to download more iso to verify. And i would like to note repair failed because of faulty rar download. I imagine if i downloaded correct rars with sab i would have no issues with the extraction as it has worked flawlessly with my setup. Oh btw i love this program and only mention this because i saw this post and if other people are having issues i thought i might help by putting my 2 cents in. Unfortunetly i do not have multiple usenet accounts to verify if its a file download problem from the server or if its a software glitch. I imagine the fact i used an alternate program to download the rars that were affected signifies its unlikely a server issues but without any technical understanding of how this softwar works, ie., im just a lazy user and not tech savy i dont know how much use this will be. Ohh i used same nzb to download both sets of files to test. So its not the nzb. I used quickpar to check files. And the sets i downloaded multiple times used sab had issues with same specific rars each time. Only downloaded from alt.binz once for each affected file. It may have been a bad nzb that was downloadeding incorrectly but sab showed no errors. Maybe alt.binz handled the nzb better? Or am i tottaly off? Is it possible to download an nzb thats flawed and have one program download files correctly? and another have issues?

[fenlander]

You don't say how old the files were, but given the number I guess that some were quite ancient. I've had this problem - rarely - with Astraweb. Sometimes too many parts of old files go missing to be repaired with the available par files.

In my case, I've had no further problems since buying a block subscription to Blocknews and setting it up in SABNZBD as the backup server. When something is missing on Astraweb, SAB gets it from Blocknews instead.

[shypike]

...

Did you see the message "X articles had non-matching duplicates" in the history entry?
When an NZB has multiple articles for the same file segment, it will pick one, always the first one.
This could be the right choice or not, possible other programs pick another article.

[foreal]

I'm running a similar setup. WHS2011, SAB, Sickbeard, Couch with Astra and Blocknews (backup) as my providers.

My failure rate isn't near as bad as the OP but I do find that the majority of my failures can be repaired with QuickPar. My failure rate also wasn't nearly as high when I was running SAB on a Mac as compared to windows. Could all just be coincidence.

[shypike]

Do any of you get this message in the log "Error importing <filename>"?
Does the "incomplete" folder reside on a local disk?

[bozrdang]

I signed up for a free 1Mb/sec account at xsusenet.com and set it up as my back up server in SAB. I then re-downloaded most of the failed shows and all but 2 finished without error. I guess it was just a lack of completion on Astraweb. It makes me wonder if I should try a different Usenet provider next month. Thanks for feedback everyone.

[pobox]

Completion on Astraweb should be easier to troubleshoot. Bozrdang spent a week on this.

[doc3d]

I have the same problem. Im totally new to SABnzbd and have set it up as good as I could. When trying to dl a series through sickbeard, ALL of the files failed, except one. This surely cant be normal..? The series in question was True Blood season 4, so its not *that* old eighter? To me it seems the dl skips ahead and doesnt download the file completely. When I try to retry, it seems it jumps back to the que and suddenly it can say something like "610 out of 654 MB downloaded" then it jumps back down to the post-processing and tries to repair again, before failing again. This repeats an all files I try in that series. Other stuff has gone through about 50% of the time. Can it be the one series I tried to dl that causes the error? -if so, then OP has a point about torrent-files being more reliable... I love the idea of nzb's but of course, I want to actually get the files Im trying to, not have 13 incomplete downloads sitting idle

Im using SABnzbd on a Synology NAS. Have a premium MatrixNZB and Powerusenet accounts

ANY ideas what can be wrong? (again, im totally noob here, so the olution might be obvious..) Thanks for any replies

[pobox]

With a backup server added you're no longer totally nubular.