Mark, This sounds a lot like you are on a USB 2.0 enabled port. It’s that or there is something a bit off about your external drive that you are backing up to. I have had recent experience with so-called cheap external backup devices, including a 1 TB external SSD and several external 1 and 2 TB external Hdd’s. In the case of the external SSD, it turned out to be a fake unit with the controller reprogrammed to emulate a 1 tB drive. It was so slow that formatting it took 9 days and it failed on verification. I ended up having to use several open source windows tools (yeah, windows, UGH! But that was what was available) and determined that the SSD was fake. I let the provider know that he might be in for trouble once I explained the situation. Btw, what is the brand of that external backup device and model? There are some tools that can be used to test the speed of the link/controller and also the read and write speed of the drive itself. Do you have access to a different external in the 2 TB size that you know actually works well? If all else fails, you can always go to Walmart and spend a few bucks on an external that is larger than you need (I think they have 2, 4 and 12 TB models available). I have several of the 1 TB models here and they are all blazing fast on a USB C (3.1) port. Takes less than an hour to properly format and I’ve used one for backup on my OS X machine so far. Anyway, let us know how it turns out. -Eric From the Central Offices of the Technomage Guild, Research and Development Dept. > On Jul 15, 2022, at 8:40 AM, Mark Phillips via PLUG-discuss wrote: > > 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 > --------------------------------------------------- > PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org > To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: > https://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss