[benzinschleuder]

Not sure about being the middleman yet. What if the big Usenet providers decide to delete data or we violate their non-business-usage policies? But on the other hand it's really cheap indeed! We can cancel our Usenet subscription and renew it when the data is needed. So I thought it's maybe better to cut out the middleman by giving the software away.

About the abuse: I imagined that the method could be used like some unlimited-disk-space-providers which had to get rid of that plan because the users used it as advertised.

Of course, apart from that, anyone can write such software. So it's maybe just a matter of time? Though I couldn't find any other solutions besides RAR archives.

The Usenet can be used as a key-value store with handicaps. And stuff can be built on top of that.

[ams6110]

I don't understand how you could use newsgroups for storage, except in a "I don't care about data loss" kind of way. I haven't used USENET in decades, but NNTP is a messaging protocol it says nothing about storage AFAIK. I do recall that back in the day, messages in busy newsgroups would expire rather quickly (probably due to limited storage on my news server at the time). So if I post a message containing my backup to a binary newsgroup, what assurance do I have that I will be able to get it back?

[usenetthrowa]

Commercial binary NNTP providers have basically infinite retention at this point, if your content doesn't generate DMCA takedown requests. E.g. http://www.news.astraweb.com/ $10/mo gets you 2660 days (>7 years) of retention, growing at roughly one day per day. (Four years ago, 3 years of retention was common.) There are also pay-by-download-in-GB a la carte plans that would be good for backup-only use (because upload is free).

Even if it isn't infinite, you can download and repost every 7 years if you care about having backups for longer than that.