Saving and Preserving Posts

You may have noticed that most of the best and most experienced posters use very clear and descriptive subject lines such as "BestSoft.FindItAll.2000.Home.and.Business.Pro (File n of nn) filename.ext (*/n)"  That  subject alone tells you just about everything you need to know to identify this application: the name of the company: "BestSoft". The name of the program: "FindItAll". The Version "2000", and the model/sub-version "Pro". They can do this easily due to the way "old hands" store the files: they burn them to CD or DVD with that descriptive name as the name of the directory on the media. It is recommended that you copy/paste that part of the subject line as the name of the directory in which you store the downloaded files for burning to optical media. I.E. create a directory with the name "BestSoft.FindItAll.2000.Home.and.Business.Pro" and store the files (nfo and zips, and SFV if provided) in it. 

Experienced collectors always preserve the files in the original format; they do not strip the RARs from the zips, or repack the files in any way. They may, for the sake of safety, create a par or two in case one or two files go bad on CD or DVD, but those aren't "posting pars" as they are too few for a post. The number of files that will be unreadable on a CD is much lower than posting incompletes, so less redundancy is needed. If you had to download a par or two in order to complete your post, you can use those to help insure the integrity of the files on CD. However PAR2 files with only a block or two, that contain fewer blocks then the largest file in the set will not be useful for restoring from CD or DVD, as an unrecoverable file is completely unrecoverable from those media. One bad sector (512 bytes) in a 50-megabyte file on disc will make the entire 50-megabyte file unreadable.  So you need full-size PAR or PAR2 files for redundancy on removable media.  

By preserving the original file names you give yourself the opportunity to help other people with fills, or to make an entire repost yourself, at some point in the future. You also make it very easy to find something yourself, especially if you use a catalog program for removable media.  By making sure the version number is in the directory-name you make it simple to compare and select the version you want to retrieve.

A note on repacking: You may have seen posters "overpack" a post, wherein they put the original RARs or ZIPs into (usually) smaller RARs for posting. When you extract the post's RARs you have the original files. The reason they do that is because so many people are still on dial-up; dividing a post into 3 - 5 MB RARs makes it easy to break-up a post over several days; and if a file "breaks" during download, a 3 - 5 MB "overpacked" file is much less of a loss of time to a re-download than is a 15 or 20 MB file.  A small file is more easily retrieved and has fewer segments for something to go wrong.  Remember that there isn't much difference between a 3 MB file posted UUE, and a 5 MB file posted yEnc, so if you overpack, consider using the 5 MB size with yEnc. There is no need to keep the "overpacked" files once the original set has been extracted, unless you are planning on helping with filling for the post or the post is not yet complete. Once the post is complete and extracted, if you are not going to be helping-out with fills you can simply discard the "overpack", keeping the original zips or RARs of the release-group. 

Any other form of repacking, other than an overpack, is not usually suitable for posting. If you must repack the contents of the files, do so for yourself only, and not for posting to UseNet. Such one-of-a-kind repacks are not universally usable because only the originator can serve as a source of fills or replacements.