Mark Hedges <hedges@sirius.infonex.com> wrote:
In practice, it's really tough to keep a good feed going. We happen to keep the alt.anon* stuff for a longer period of time.
As do I. The use of alt.anonymous.messages as an anonymous message pool has become quite popular lately, to the point where the traffic often reaches several MB per day.
We've started keeping individual groups longer as requested by readers. This makes them happy, for the most part. It needs so much disk! We have two incoming server feeds and three outgoing and people still complain that their groups don't have enough messages for their liking. ... A server would need terabyte upon terabyte to store a good archive of Usenet for, say, the past year.
Actually, I am suprised at how small a segment of the internet populace actually posts. Can you imagine what would happen if a hundred million people posted every day? You'd need a terabyte for just one day! One nice thing is that it is highly redundant, most usenet traffic can be compressed by a 4:1 ratio. You could probably fit your one-year archive into a few hundred GB. Long-term, it would probably be more reasonable to have people just store and forward the groups that they are interested in, more like mailing lists. But I must admit that I read this list via nntp, because it's just so much easier to have everything in one place, so until things seriously break, I suspect most people will want to have big nntp servers with everything on them.