I finally got rsync working. It seems that it didn't like --progress and --compress-level=5. Or maybe something else... the quotes?

worked:

rsync -aWuq --delete-before /home/bmike1/Documents /media/bmike1/USB\ DISK/

not work: 

rsync -aWq --progress --delete-before --compress-level=5 /home/bmike1/Documents /media/bmike1/"USB DISK"/

rsync -aWuq --progress --delete-before --compress-level=5 /home/bmike1/Documents /media/bmike1/USB\ DISK/