Upload and publish a folder

Turning a folder on your disk into a link you can send someone.

Before you start: setup complete, all three Overview cards green. If you are publishing a private share, collect your recipients' identity tokens first — see Public, password and private shares, because you cannot add them after publishing without re-publishing.

The quick version

Upload → paste your folder path → choose Public, Password Protected or Private → Start Upload. When it finishes you get a link. Send the link.

The rest of this guide is what to choose and why, and what to do when it does not go smoothly.

Step 1 — choose what to publish

Go to Upload.

What are you uploading? — A folder or A single file.

A folder becomes a browsable share: recipients see your directory structure and can take any part of it. A single file becomes a share of its own and is not moved on disk.

Fill in Folder Path or File Path, or press Browse... to pick it.

Newsgroup defaults to what you set during setup. Change it only if you have a reason; alt.binaries.test is for experiments and some providers expire it quickly.

Nothing is moved, copied or changed

Indexing reads your folder. Your files stay exactly where they are, untouched. You can keep using them while a publish runs.

Step 2 — now or later

What do you want to do?

Upload now is what you want most of the time.

Add & index only is useful when you want to see what is in a folder — file count, total size, how it will be segmented — before committing bandwidth, or when you are cataloguing several folders to upload overnight. Indexing is read-only and costs nothing but time and disk reads. You upload later from the folder's own page.

Step 3 — decide who can open it

Share Type is the one decision worth thinking about, because it determines how the decryption key reaches your recipient, and that cannot be changed for a link once it is out.

For Password Protected, fill in Password. It is never uploaded and never stored; the key is derived from it. Lose it and the share is unrecoverable, so put it in your password manager now, not later.

For Private, add each recipient under Authorized Consumers by pasting the identity token they gave you, then Add Consumer. You are always included automatically, so a private share with no other recipients is a share only you can open — which is a legitimate thing to want, for backup.

Full detail, including how recipients get you their token and how to reuse a group of people across folders: Public, password and private shares.

Step 4 — start it

Press Start Upload (or Add & Index Folder for index-only).

Six stages run, and the page shows which one you are in:

You can close the browser. The work runs in the background service, not in the page. Come back to the Dashboard whenever you like; Queue shows live progress.

You can restart the app or reboot. Publishing is checkpointed. It resumes from the last checkpoint and does not re-upload what it already posted.

What speed to expect

Upload speed is set by how fast your provider acknowledges each article, not by your connection. The difference between providers is large and measurable: across four major backbones, with identical software and identical articles, the acknowledgement took anywhere from 77 ms to 2,654 ms — worth more than a thirtyfold difference in throughput per connection.

If your upload seems slow at a healthy connection count, your provider is very likely the reason. Adding a second provider account (Settings → Connection → Multi-account posting) is the effective fix, because the two accounts' limits add up. See Recommended settings.

Step 5 — get your link

When Publish completes you get Share Link Created! with a Copy button. The link also lives on the folder's Share tab for ever after, so you do not need to save it anywhere special.

A badge next to it reads v4 · signed or v5 · signed — that is the catalogue format, not something you chose. See How it works.

Send the link. For a password share, send the password by a different route.

Changing a published folder

Your folder is not frozen. Both routes are on the folder's page.

The files changed

1. Files tab → Re-Index. This detects what was added, modified and deleted, and shows you the list.
2. Upload Changes posts only the new and changed content. Unchanged files are reused on Usenet and are not re-uploaded.
3. Publish Changes mints the new version.

The Versions tab keeps the history and has a Publish New Version action that does the same from there.

Nothing changed, but you want to refresh it

Re-Publish re-posts the catalogue while reusing all the existing data. Useful to refresh the catalogue articles against retention, or after changing the access type or the recipient list.

The part people get caught by

Re-publishing mints a NEW link, and the previous link stops working.

The app warns you before it does it. Plan for it: after any re-publish or new version, the new link has to reach everyone who had the old one. There is no way to update a link already sitting in someone's inbox.

For private shares this is also how you add or remove a recipient — change the Recipients tab, then re-publish. Recipient changes take effect on the next publish, not immediately.

Keeping a share healthy over time

Usenet retention is finite, so a share you care about needs a little attention. Two things on the folder's page:

Redundancy tab — extra copies of every piece, so the share survives losing some. The default is 3 copies of your content. For anything irreplaceable, add more. Check reports current health; Repair re-posts what has gone missing.

Verify Segments (all) on the Files tab — asks your provider to confirm every article is still there. Run it occasionally on important shares. Retry Failed Verifications and Retry Failed Uploads re-run only the failed subset, which is cheap and does not re-index anything.

Detail: Verify and repair.

When it goes wrong

Upload fails part-way. Press upload again. It resumes from the checkpoint, does not restart, and does not re-post what is already up. If it fails repeatedly at the same point, the Logs page will say why.

502 too many connections. Max Connections is above your plan, or another program is using the same provider account. See Set up.

Verify reports failures. Some providers accept an article and take a while to make it retrievable. Wait a few minutes and Retry Failed Verifications before concluding anything is wrong.

Indexing is very slow. It hashes every byte of every file, so it is limited by your disk. A network drive or an external USB disk holding the source is usually the reason.

"No authorized recipients yet" on a private publish. The Recipients list is empty — add at least one identity token, or publish as Public or Password Protected instead.

Next

• Public, password and private shares — access in depth
• Verify and repair — keeping shares alive
• Recommended settings — what actually affects upload speed
• Mount a share as a drive — your own published folders can be mounted too.