everytime i start with a fresh new workspace, m2eclipse downloads nexus-maven-repository-index.gz from the maven central repository. this is good. but, some times, i just want to start a new workspace, and not wait for it to download, it tried copying the whole .metadata directory from an old workspace to the new one, but the list of maven artifacts are still empty. is there a way i can cache it? or at least download the file once, and the copy/extract/repackage it so that m2eclipse thinks it has already downloaded it and allows me to search for maven artifacts.

or a short version of the question where and in what format is the "nexus-maven-repository-index.gz" file stored in the workspace?