English: This is a visual representation of the complex process of splitting, converting and preparing data files for transfer through the Usenet binaries newsgroups, when the data to be posted is too large to be posted as a single article.

When the data is small enough to be posted as a single article, the splitting and parity creation steps are not necessary.

The definition of what posting size is too large can vary from news server to news server, and from newsgroup to newsgroup. But generally the maximum permitted post size has been slowly increasing for years, with servers in the beginning allowing perhaps only 32 kilobytes in a single post (as if a normal text message), to the largest commercial servers now permitting up to 50 megabytes per post for DVD/CD redistribution.

The nine RAR sections are shown only for visual compactness and clarity of the process. In actual practice the number of sections for huge files can number in the hundreds. With a maximum article size of 50 megabytes, it takes about 100 posts to upload a 4.7 gigabyte DVD, assuming yEnc is used and no redundant parity recovery files are used. Parity can increase the overall size by up to 30%, and less efficient encodings such as UU or MIME64 can tack on another 25%, nearly doubling the 4.7-gig DVD posting to over 7 gigabytes and 150 posts.

If the maximum permitted post size were only 10 megabytes, this increases the total number of sections of this example DVD posting to 750 articles, and greatly increases the risk of missed sections and an unusable download.