Quick question - NZBs

[asari]

I've just signed up with astraweb, and I was wondering is there is something like RS's RapidShare Checker for NZBs.

Preferably for free.

[zot]

Yes. There is NZB Download Checker


NZB Download Checker is a small freeware tool that checks an NZB for you, in order find out if the files you want to download from Usenet exist on the newsserver(s). This way you don't have to download large files, only to find out half way through, you won't be able to get the download complete and are wasting your time and bandwidth.

Every file on Usenet is split up into many separate parts and every part has its own unique number (Message ID). NZB Download Checker sends all the Message ID's listed in the NZB file to your newsserver(s) and checks which reply it gets back from the newsserver. This way it can determine how much of the data is available without actually downloading the files.

http://members.home.nl/yencbin_poster/nzb_download_checker/

This tool might come in handy for checking for completeness of files that are on the very edge of the server's retention limit. Probably very useful on the type of ISP newsserver that only carries a few days binary retention , but with Astraweb's almost full-year retention, it's probably very rare that anyone would be trying to download a file that's about to expire, so a tool like this becomes much less useful on a premium server.

You could also just load the NZB into Alt.Binz (or whatever newsreader) and see if it downloads. That's usually what I do.