The download took all night. It ended a little after 7 this morning, which pegs it at about 14 hours to download 65GB. My internet connection is a 10Mbit cable line, so there’s a bench mark of sorts.
When I embarked on this little project, my goal was to come up with a way to force apt-cacher-ng to update all of its cache on a schedule. For the native machine/architecture all that is required is to schedule an apt-get update which can be done by enabling it in the apt config files. But I couldn’t figure out how to force the same thing for a foreign architecture (ie- for another computer running i386 based stuff) so the files would already exist on the network.
The more I thought about it, I realized there wasn’t any bandwidth savings to be had because, though both machines run debian/testing, they both required different sets of package files because of the different architectures. Therefore, anything I was doing was going to be for creating a more convenient update process by having the files already present on the local network. The apt-mirror package isn’t ideal since it downloads an entire repository for a debian branch rather than caching and updating just the packages I need. However, it’s better than a full-blown mirror and, once it’s initially setup, the downloading is merely a matter of updating the local repository. In the end, it seemed like the best compromise.