SABnzbd - Downloading
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Important:When downloading from binary newsgroups on Usenet you will notice that besides free material there are also files that are copyrighted. Downloading or distributing copyrighted material is prohibited by law. This site isn’t meant to promote distributing this material, it’s only meant to explain how binary newsgroups and related software work. You won’t find any links to such material, cracks or serial numbers here. Therefore our advise: study what is allowed by law and act accordingly.
The program and servers have been set up, now it's time to start downloading. Like I've written before you can only download with SABnzbd by importing an NZB-file (or the URL where this file can be found). You can't browse (headers of) newsgroups manually (the traditional method of downloading). So you have to acquire NZB-files. This is further explained in our manual: 'What are NZB-files?'. As a test I'm going to download a freeware collection.
Click on 'Add NZB' on the top:
Next click on the button under 'URL' (for some reason shown in Dutch in my screenshot, where it is called 'Bestand kiezen'). Select the NZB file and then click in 'Upload'.
It is easier to save the NZB-file directly into a special folder that SABnzbd monitors continuously. We have set this folder earlier in the configuration chapter. The program will import the NZB-file and start downloading. You will not even have to open your browser, it will all run in the background.
Regardless of which method you use, when the file has been imported we can see it's progress in the 'Queue' section.
Here you can see that one task is being carried out and you can see its progress. You can also see the estimated download time. Some of the items can be seen in the screenshot below. If you hover the mouse over the row, on the right-hand side an icon appears to delete the task from the queue. Furthermore you can drag rows up and down to decide which item should be downloaded first.
If you hover the mouse over the download speed indicator, you can set a speed limit if you like:
There is also the possibility to pause downloading:
If you hover the mouse over the icon next to it, some more options appear:
The arrow next to it leads to some options related to what SABnzbd should do once downloading has finished and the queue is empty:
With 'On Finish' we can assign what has to be done when the queue is empty. For instance shutting SABnzbd down, shutting the computer down.
If you click on the icon in the first column of the row more information about the task will be shown:
Now we can see exactly which files are being downloaded. As you can see several are finished, several are ready to be downloaded and PAR2-repair files will be downloaded if necessary (to repair corrupted files)! Sometimes the program will download a PAR2-file with one block for verification purposes.
Let's take a look at the 'Connections' section within the 'Status' page:
Here you can see how many connections are made and which servers are currently being used. When there are problems you can close the connections by pressing 'Force Disconnect'.
When a collection has finished downloading, SABnzbd will start checking and downloading repair files, repair and extract. We will discuss these activities in the next chapter.
To the next chapter: 
Repairing and unpacking