Introduction
Usenet has some advantages over other technologies like bit-torrent, it offers speed, reliability, and the option of SSL, sure, it costs money, but its not that expensive, and in my mind its worth every penny, i would personally recommend Giganews they have the worlds longest usenet binary retention, multiple gigabit-plus backbones running at a fraction of capacity, and the option of 256-bit SSL encryption among other things.
Changelog
2008-04-11 – initial article published.
2010-06-19 – Article updated with more up to date information
Getting started
Usenet is a little more difficult to use than torrents, so here is some information to help you.
First thing you need to do is register with a usenet provider, i personally use Giganews but there are plenty to choose from.
Second you will need a way to search usenet for this you can use, newzbin is probably the easiest and arguably the best, but its had its share of problems lately, a recent court decision saw it taken down, only to be resurrected under a hacker group, time will tell how it gets on under its new management, but until then my suggestion would be nzbmatrix
These providers will allow you to download .nzb files, these files provide links to the locations of files on Usenet. Generally a large file is broken into several rar files, the providers index all the parts required for a file and provide the location for these parts in a .nzb.
Thirdly you will need a binary client, my recommendation is SABnzbd+ it has clients for Windows, Mac and Linux and is very easy to setup and use its also open source software and completely free to use. I used to use http://www.newsleecher.com/, which is a fully featured client, however, you need to pay for this one and it doesn’t really offer anything over SABnzbd+ that can justify the price.
When you download a .nzb your binary client will download all the parts that are indexed and attempt to reconstruct it back into a single file (depending on the options selected in the software), one of the advantages of Usenet is most files are uploaded with par files. If parts are missing or corrupt from a post, generally par files can be used to reconstruct the missing/corrupt parts.
