Someone sent you a link. Here is how to open it and get the files.
Before you start: setup complete — you need your own Usenet provider account and a license. The person who sent you the link does not supply either; you read the articles from your own provider.
The quick version
Download → paste the link → Import (Index Only) → browse the file tree → tick what you want → Download selected.
Two steps, and the reason for the first is worth understanding.
Step 1 — import the link
Go to Download. The section is Import Share Link.
| Field | |
|---|---|
| Share Link | Paste the whole thing. Both usn://… and usenet://… are accepted. |
| Password (if required) | Only for a password-protected share. Leave empty otherwise. |
| Download location | Where files should go. Browse… to pick. Defaults to your Storage setting. |
Then choose one of two buttons — and this choice matters.
Import (Index Only) — recommended
Fetches the share's catalogue and nothing else. No content is downloaded.
You get a browsable file tree, sizes, and total, and you then decide what you actually want. Cheap and fast even for a share of many terabytes.
Use this by default. It is not a preliminary step you can skip; it is how you avoid downloading 18 TB when you wanted four files.
Import & Download
Imports the catalogue and then immediately starts downloading the entire share.
Only use this when you already know you want all of it and you know how big it is.
While it imports
The panel says "Queueing the import…" then "Fetching the share's index from Usenet…".
Large shares take a while here — the catalogue itself is fetched from Usenet and unpacked into a browsable tree. After twenty seconds you get Continue in background (go to Dashboard), and taking it is fine: the import carries on and the share appears when it is ready.
Copied a link? The app noticed
If you copy a usn:// link anywhere on your machine, a prompt appears:
"You copied a share link. Import it?" with Import (index only),
Review options and Not now.
This saves the paste. It only ever offers — nothing is imported without you pressing the button. Turn it off in Settings → System → Clipboard monitor (Stop watching on the prompt goes straight there).
Step 2 — choose and download
You land on the share's page, and the share also appears in your Library and on the Dashboard.
The Files tab has the file tree. Tick files or folders — ticking a folder selects everything under it — and press Download selected (N).
To take everything, press Download in the header. For anything large the app asks you to confirm first, because "everything" on a multi-terabyte share is a serious commitment.
Choosing where files go. The location set at import is used. Change it per share on the Files tab (Download location → Browse… → Save Location), or change your default for everything on the Storage page.
Detail on picking parts of big shares, and what changes at terabyte scale: Big shares and picking files.
Watching it run
The download card shows, live:
- a status badge and a plain-language stage line
- Working on: the current file
- how many files are done out of the total, and bytes for large files
- Speed, ETA, Remaining, On disk
- a scope badge naming what is being downloaded — your selection or the whole share
That scope badge is worth glancing at. It is how you confirm the app is fetching the twelve files you picked and not the whole share.
You can close the browser. The transfer runs in the background service. Queue shows everything in flight.
It finishes downloading and then keeps working
At the end you will see something like:
Download finished — all 412 GB are on disk. Now checking every byte reads back correctly: 3,204 of 8,110 at 340 MB/s, about 4 minutes left
This is the final integrity pass: everything transferred, and the app is now reading it back off your disk to confirm what landed is what was published. Every piece was already verified as it arrived; this catches the disk, not the network.
It is not stuck. It reports a rate and an ETA. On a slow destination — a NAS over Wi-Fi, a USB 2 drive — it can take a noticeable fraction of the download time, because it is limited by how fast your drive can be read.
You can control how much of this happens for very large files in Settings → Performance → Final check of very large files. See Recommended settings.
Pause, resume, cancel
All three are in the share's header, and all three work on a running download.
| Button | Does |
|---|---|
| Pause | Stops now. Everything downloaded so far is kept. |
| Resume | Carries on from where it stopped. Nothing is re-fetched. |
| Cancel | Stops for good. Files already downloaded are kept. |
Pausing loses nothing. Downloads are checkpointed continuously and write to a
.part file, so resuming picks up mid-file rather than restarting it.
Cancel is final but not destructive. It will not restart itself, and the automatic resume that recovers from a crash deliberately leaves a cancelled download alone. What you already downloaded stays on disk. Download again appears if you change your mind, and it reuses everything already there.
A restart or a power cut is a pause, not a loss. In-flight work resumes when the app next starts.
Streaming instead of downloading
You do not have to download at all. Files can be read on demand, as programs open them, with only the bytes actually touched fetched from Usenet:
| You want | Guide |
|---|---|
| The share as a normal drive or folder | Mount a share as a drive |
| A disk image onto a USB stick or SSD | Write a disk image to a drive |
| A few files out of a disk image | Browse inside a disk image |
| It in rclone, the aws CLI, or a script | S3 object storage |
If you have already downloaded a file, streaming it is served from your disk and uses no provider connections at all.
When it goes wrong
"Access denied" on import. A private share you are not authorised on. Send the owner Settings → Identity → Your Identity Token and ask them to add you and re-publish — the re-publish is required, and gives a new link you will also need. If you were authorised on a different install, note that identity is per-machine.
Wrong password. Password shares fail at import with nothing else to go on. Ask the sender to confirm it. Nobody can recover it, including them, if they have lost it themselves.
"Missing or expired articles". Usenet retention is finite and this share is old enough that some pieces have gone. Ask the owner to repair or re-publish it. Nothing on your side fixes it. See Verify and repair.
A download stopped. Press download again — it resumes, it does not restart.
Very slow. Do not start changing settings. Run the built-in test first: Help & Support → Check your speed. It measures your provider, your drive's write speed and its read speed separately, and says in plain language which is the ceiling. It is frequently the destination disk rather than the network. See When something is wrong.
It got slower when you started streaming something. Both draw on the same provider connection limit and take half each by default. The banner at the top lets you give either side everything.
A re-download finished impossibly fast. That is correct. Downloading into a folder that already holds good copies checks them against the published hashes and reuses them rather than fetching again. The progress line says how many were reused.
The file listing looks incomplete. Very large shares build their tree progressively and the page tells you while it is working. Other tabs stay usable meanwhile, and you can start a download before it finishes. See Big shares and picking files.
Next
- Big shares and picking files
- Verify and repair — proving your copy is good
- When something is wrong — measure before you tune