SABnzbd Forums

Having just started using nzb files, im now beginning to find them quite irritating on the odd (but too frequent) occasion, and im just wondering if people had any tips to avoid this heartbreak.

Of my scheduled stuff, that has worked 99% of the time, its as reliable as any other method ive used before, so i have no issues with that.
What seems to be the problem is older content. I'll add a few things to the queue and then find once its downloaded that the files are completely corrupt and its absolutely worthless.

I'd just downloaded 2 nvb files, the first one had a single rar file which was corrupt (unexpected end of archive), and no PAR files to repair it. I did a little googling and found a newsgroup search thing and used that to download that 1 rar file, only to see its equally corrupt (the file size didnt match the rest, a sure sign its not right). Thankfully they had the PAR files, so i just got those, and it repaired it for me. On that occasion it saved me, after some faffing about.
The 2nd file though, which had finished while i was messing with the above... 60 out of 93 files had the 'unexpected end' and were completely irratic filesizes. Even the PAR files, so really this is completely useless to me.
Asside from going through the download with a fine tooth comb, looking for size irregularities and missing RAR files, is there something i can do to really reduce the likelyhood of these older files being completely shot to hell?

I've used newsgroups for a few years, but just plucking the odd file out (usually the auto-extracted file), so im not too familiar with anything beyond my NG providers search tool (EasyNews) and thats it. I see they have nzb viewer which is handy for identifying if all files are there, but lately ive been using an nzb site, and often EasyNews doesnt show the nzb, or the files it'll be pulling, so im stuck with what i can figure out from SABnzbd telling me.

Im not familiar with what can be discussed and to what extent, so trying to limit going into too much info without being cryptic. Can anyone offer some advice, because right now it feels like if its older than say 1yr, stay well away, as too frequently its been unreliable, like 50/50. My friend has had the same, getting a large collection around 40gb and its been completely worthless. Obviously not SAB's fault, but i could really do with some tips and pointers to significantly reduce the likelyhood of repeating these circumstances.

I rarely have trouble with Giganews (or Supernews their cheaper brother).
There are some pay-per-GB providers that you can use as a backup server (eg. blocknews.net or astraweb.com).
You can buy a block of (say) 25G from them.

Always have a look how old the upload is.
Normally everything younger then 400 days should not be a problem.

After that it can be more of a problem

400+ days should not be a problem either, rascalli.

I also occasionally get a corrupt download that I can't repair, and as I have a limited internet download quota (100GB/month is usually enough for me but still), it pisses me to have to look for another post and redownload the whole thing, especially as those hd videos are quite big.

Actually, I am also an Easynews customer and as I have had problems with their (web) retention not being what was advertised in the past (they had said "200 days and growing" long before and it was still less than 200 days), I thought they were the problem.
So just today I got a 10GB (once off) block from NewsDemon, thinking I would use it as a back-up server and amazingly enough, the same articles (from a recent failed download) are also missing from their servers (and other articles from the same post are present on both servers, it's just some articles missing from every single file of the post which makes it completely useless).
By the way, Easynews announces 1000 days (nntp) retention and NewsDemon 1035+ days and the files I was trying to download are 58 and 480 days old so that shouldn't be the problem.

What I was wondering is if there was a way to figure out wether a post is complete beforehand, I trusted NZBIndex as it sometimes tells you articles are missing (that's where I get my NZB's from by the way if there could be any problem with that) but in the 2 last cases, the posts were showing as complete. And of course they could be missing from just your server, hence why I tried to add another server...
I thought I saw in another client that it would tell you if articles were missing before downloading but I'm not sure now. If it's possible, maybe that would be a useful feature to add to SABNZBD

I also noticed that in most NZB's I got lately, including the ones with articles missing, the articles are shown as xxxx@eu.news.astraweb.com.
Does that mean they were posted on Astraweb or just that the referencer was on Astraweb ?
Would I have more luck trying to download those missing files with an Astraweb account ?

One user has created a pre-check script: http://forums.sabnzbd.org/index.php?topic=5074.0

Later we will implement such a thing in SABnzbd.

To backup Easynews, NewsDemon or other Highwinds group providers, add block account servers from Astraweb, and a 'Readnews' provider such as Usenet-News.net or Blocknews.net .

Tip:  When you see msg-id's of the form 'nnnnnnnnnn.nnnnn.nn@eu.news.astraweb.com' they were posted to Astraweb by a certain posting program that puts the part number just before the '@' sign.  If you notice the log reporting missing parts that are all or mostly part 1, such as , it means that post was the target of a DMCA takedown notice for the provider that you're using.  Some notices for whatever reason list only the first parts of every file in the post.

What do you mean, are they the 3 main providers ? I'll probably take a block account from Astraweb and see how that works out. I hadn't realized Easynews and Newsdemon were using the same provider.
I'll also look into the script but it doesn't seem to be available at the moment.
Thank you both for the info.