Per the Peering page, a new setup of SKS must load a recent dump of keys, so that the set reconciliation algorithm used for the peering mesh only needs to transfer a relatively small number of keys when you join the public mesh.

A few operators generously make their keydumps available for public download. This page attempts to track the known sources. The complete collection is, at time of writing, around 14GB large.

The main PGP SKS keyserver pool is automatically filtered to only contain keyservers that have "enough" keys, so are up-to-date. So requesting stats from any of them:

http://pool.sks-keyservers.net:11371/pks/lookup?op=stats

should be sufficient. Look for the "Statistics" section, "Total number of keys:". That tells you how many keys are needed to be "current". The count goes up between 100 and 400 keys per day, so a weekly keydump might be as much as 2800 keys below the "current" figure. If the number of keys you get from loading a dump is less than this, then you're unfortunately out of date and will have to start over.

Building the indices is time-consuming. Don't suffer through doing it twice. Instead, look through the multiple sources of keys below and pick one of the largest files.

• http://keys.niif.hu/keydump/ generated every Monday
• https://mirror.cyberbits.eu/sks/dump/ generated every Monday
• https://keywin.trifence.ch/dumps/ (monthly dump plus daily incrementals at midnight UTC)
• http://pgp.uni-mainz.de/dump/
• NFS v4 from sks.srv.dumain.com:/dumps/current/ Generated every Sunday and rotated out of existence 2 weeks later. Use for full import only NOT fast-import.
• rsync://rsync.cyberbits.eu/sks/dump/

Obsolete (to be removed):

• https://pgp.key-server.io/sks-dump/ generated every day at midnight UTC (last update Jan 2021)