Back-ground: I am copying data from old back-ups on CD-ROMS and DVDs to the hard-drive of my new PC (mb: Z-390, cpu:Intel Core i7, hd:2TB, ssd: M.2 type) from CD-ROMs and DVDs in the optic drive to the hard disk or SSD.
With Nautilus the operation is extremely slow and spends quarter to half a day for one DVD with 4GB data (lots of small files).
Copying (from the terminal window) using cp or scp is also extremely slow.
However, with rsync I achieve a significant speed up where the copy operation spends only 10-20 minutes:
cd /media/path/
rsync -rvh --chmod=ug=rwX * /to/path/