I have an Ubuntu 18.04 system with two drives in an lvm with one logical
root partition. I am trying to back up the contents of the drives (ie /) to
an external usb drive using rsync. It is taking a really long time. After
26 hours of continuous operation I have only transferred 138 GB out of 2+
TB, so I am looking at about 16 days to complete the transfer.

My rsync command is:
sudo rsync  --no-compress --info=progress2 -avAXEWSlHh
--exclude={'/run','/mnt','/swapfile','/boot','/dev','/proc','/sys','/run','/mnt','/media','/lost+found','/swapfile.extended','/tmp'}
/ '/media/mark/Seagate Portable Drive/tsunami-backups-Jul_13_17-39/'

Any suggestions on how I can speed this up and not lose any data?

Thanks!

Mark