GrabIt - Downloading headers and files

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Downloading headers

A bug in GrabIt: The large group bug
GrabIt is not able to handle the headers of really large groups at this moment. The maximum amount of headers GrabIt can handle depends on your computer. When GrabIt hits its limit on your system, it will download all the headers, but will not show them. Or it will be stuck processing them for a really long time (days). Since release 1.5.2 there is an option to limit the maximum amount of headers per group.

We ended the previous chapter with subscribing to a Usenet newsgroup. The next step is to download the headers from that Usenet newsgroup. This can also be done in two ways:. either right click, or select and click the Update group button.

We have two types of updating:

Full update: complete group update, downloads all headers.
Incremental update: incremental group update, downloads only the new headers that were posted since the last update.

If we only click Update Group a Full update is performed automatically . With the tiny arrow on the right we can also choose to perform an Incremental update.

Let’s choose to perform a full update because it’s the first time we are updating at all. If we head over to our Batch tab, we will see GrabIt actually downloading the headers from alt.binaries.boneless. (Note: the more articles a group contains, the longer update will take).

At the bottom of the screen you can see information about the download speed and the time remaining:

If we take a look at the left side of the Group tab (the name of which has changed to alt.binaries.boneless), we see a column of icons. These icons are the filters which we can apply to filter or show particular headers. My advice is to enable all buttons except for the first one (only show new headers).

	Only show new headers.
	Show complete multipart files.
	Show singlepart files.
	Show incomplete multipart files.
	Show downloaded multipart files.
	Show downloaded singlepart files.
	Show deleted complete multipart files.
	Show deleted singlepart files.
	Show deleted incomplete multipart files.

When GrabIt has finished downloading the headers, we can watch them in the Group tab.

When the group has been fully loaded, we see can the headers in alt.binaries.boneless if the filters have been applied correctly. As you can see, some headers have different colors:

Blue: singlepart files. Mostly .txt files but often also .nzb, .nfo, the first .par2 file etc.
Red: incomplete multipart files.
Black: complete multipart files. These are the headers in the way we want them.

Downloading files

As an example we’re going to download the free program called ‘FTD Watchdog’, which was posted recently (at the time I wrote this tutorial, obviously).

1) This is only an example. Files in Usenet binary newsgroups are only available for a limited number of days so the files that we will download in this tutorial aren't available anymore. Of course you can use the same procedure for every other file as well.

2) Are some of the files that you have downloaded incomplete?
Then read our tutorial about incomplete files!

The program was posted to alt.binaries.boneless, so the post that we are looking for should be within these headers. Using the Find button, we can search through the headers for our post. This method saves us a lot of time.

Just enter a search string, set some options and click OK.

The results are shown in the same screen and the other headers are hidden, just as selected. Now we see just a couple of headers related to our search string.

.rar file: this is the most important file. This small program only contains one .rar file, but in larger posts you have to download all of them.
.par2 files: these are the files we use to repair our .rar file if a post is incomplete.

We want to download all of these items, so just select them all and click the Grab button. The files will now be downloaded to our default download folder (as set up in the Configuration section). Clicking on the arrow just to the right of the button gives us some alternatives.

We want these files just to be downloaded to our default folder, so clicking the Grab button will do the trick. If you want your files to be downloaded elsewhere, just click Grab selected article(s) to folder instead.

Now let’s take a look at our Batch tab. We can see GrabIt downloading the files we selected.

If you want to pause the download, simply click the Pause button and your downloads will stop. Click again and they will resume.

While downloading you can see an area with 32 checkboxes in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen (at the Batch tab). This means that GrabIt can set-up maximally 32 connections to newsservers. However it will never use more connections to a single serve than the number that we specified while adding the server. By unchecking checkboxes you can limit the total number of connections that Grabit will use: if you only have 1 box checked, Grabit will only use 1 connection, even if you specified that more connections can be made to a certain server. So unchecking these boxes is helpful if you temporarily want to decrease the number of connections that Grabit makes.

If we want to download files in your batch from another server because they aren't available at your default server,for example, just right click the files in your Batch tab and select Download with other server. If you want to download from another server directly, however, it would probably be better to download the headers from that server first.

In the next chapter I will discuss two other ways of downloading with GrabIt, without needing to update groups and download headers.

To the next chapter: GrabIt Search and NZB files

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