I would like to know the total size of the ubuntu repositories here. Is there a command that I can use (perhaps involving wget) that queries the total size of all files inside this directory, without downloading them?
Doing a quick du -hd1 on my own personal Ubuntu mirror of the official repository containing 10.04 Lucid, 12.04 Precise and 14.04 Trusty, I'm consuming 418GB of disk space (not including the Extras and Partner repositories):
$ du -hd1
1.1G ./dists
417G ./pool
418G .
$
$ du -hd1 dists
160M dists/lucid
2.1M dists/lucid-backports
42M dists/lucid-proposed
58M dists/lucid-security
93M dists/lucid-updates
200M dists/precise
2.4M dists/precise-backports
71M dists/precise-proposed
59M dists/precise-security
102M dists/precise-updates
256M dists/trusty
888K dists/trusty-backports
40M dists/trusty-proposed
7.4M dists/trusty-security
16M dists/trusty-updates
1.1G dists
$
$ du -hd1 pool
217G pool/universe
171G pool/main
5.4G pool/restricted
24G pool/multiverse
417G pool
$
My mirror contains 32-bit, 64-bit and source data, updated once every 24 hours.
Remember that certain packages are shared between releases, so even if each individual release's mirror by itself was, for arguments sake, 200GB each, that does not necessarily mean that combining three releases automatically consumes 600GB of space, because you are only keeping one copy of each unique file in your mirror.
Let's be honest, 500GB across three LTS' is not whole lot of disk space these days...
