Staging – How Long?

How long should the staging process take? It’s just sitting at the “syncing changes” with no feedback as to how far along it is? Does this take awhile? And once it’s done, is the staging site retained so that when I update plugins and so forth I don’t have to sit here all day long, again, while it creates a staging site? Because staging is pretty worthless if it takes this long just to use it to update plugins. thanks!