After Downloading
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SECTION UNDER CONSTRUCTION
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After Downloading
Once files have been downloaded, then Newsbin's primary job has been completed. From a user perspective this is not the end of the story and there are other tasks to be performed. This section covers what support Newsbin provides for such tasks in areas such as:
- Organizing downloaded posts
- Checking posts for completeness
- Repairing damaged posts
- Unpacking multi-file archives
Organizing Downloaded Posts
The nature of Usenet means that files that are downloaded can arrive either incomplete with part of them missing, or apparently complete but with the data being different to that the original poster uploaded. To help identify such issues many post are accompanied by additional files that can be used with external tools to check the files downloaded.
Examples of the file extensions that identify this type of file are:
- .sfv/.md5
these files provide a list of files to be checked and the checksum for each file. They thus allow you to check for completeness and corruption but if any is identified they provide no inherent way of correcting the problem. - .par
This was the first attempt at a mechanism that combined checking for completeness/corruption and a mechanism for recovery if problems were identified. - .par2
This is now probably the most widely adopted form of file to be used for this purpose. They provide both checking for completeness and corruption and recovery. Unlike the earlier PAR based mechanism the PAR2 mechanism can make use of the good parts of incomplete and corrupted files when recovering, thus minimizing the amount of recovery data required.
Although there are many tools that can handle some of these file types, the one that is recommended is QuickPar that can handle all these types of checks plus the recovery tasks described in the next section.
Checking Posts for Completeness
The first thing that is normally done is to run a tool that can use one of the file types mentioned above to check posts for completeness.
Newsbin provides a level of support for this via the AutoRAR tab. This will list all file sets that have been downloaded and whether there are any PAR/PAR2 type files associated with the file-set. If there are then it allows you to launch the checking program. Note that Newsbin simply uses the Windows file level association for the PAR.PAR2 files, so you can use whatever tool you prefer although as mentioned earlier QuickPar is the recommended tool.
Repairing Damaged Posts
The long term road-map for Newsbin includes integrating such facilities into Newsbin itself. Until that finally happens the need for external software to check and repair downloaded files will continue to remain.
