Path: utzoo!attcan!telly!druid!darcy From: darcy@druid.uucp (D'Arcy J.M. Cain) Newsgroups: news.newusers.questions Subject: Re: old news Message-ID: <1990Feb19.160606.9002@druid.uucp> Date: 19 Feb 90 16:06:06 GMT References: <50943@sgi.sgi.com> <13956@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> Reply-To: darcy@druid.UUCP (D'Arcy J.M. Cain) Organization: D'Arcy Cain Consulting, West Hill, Ontario Lines: 31 In article <13956@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> (Jim Kelly) writes: >John Eisenman: >>How can I access older news articles that have expired at my site? > >Christopher Davis: >>There isn't a way to look through expired articles on most groups. > >I've wondered about this question for two years, and this is the >answer I was expecting. Why does the news take pains to give articles >unique ID numbers and keep a "References:" line if the articles can't >be retrieved? > Actually you can generally archive them yourself on your own system but better have plenty of disk space. Those messages have to be kept somewhere if you are going to retrieve them. News programs are specifically written to allow expiry of articles so that you don't choke your memory. Consider that news is sending 3 to 8 megabytes a day to your system. Do you really want to store that forever? If you have 500 megabytes to spare you can keep a few months worth of news. The purpose of unique numbers is to prevent having the same message show up more than once on your system and be presented as a new message. Many sites get multiple feeds to guarantee a full, uninterruptable news feed and without unique numbers each copy of an article would be added to the news data base. -- D'Arcy J.M. Cain (darcy@druid) | Thank goodness we don't get all D'Arcy Cain Consulting | the government we pay for. West Hill, Ontario, Canada | (416) 281-6094 |