I sometimes found that when using simple right-click and copy-and-paste, some files/directories are not copied completely or not at all, because of various reasons, such as some saved webpage files/directories have some strange characters in their names or their names are too long.

For example,

in Windows 7, I save this webpage http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/working-around-windows-vistas-shrink-volume-inadequacy-problems/ completely in a very deep directories whose parent directories may have long names, I cannot copy its top ancestry directory, as Windows complains the filename for the saved webpage directory is too long.

In Ubuntu, sometimes I can save a file with some special character such as newline under some directory. But when I copy that directory, it will say the file name has some special character and I will have to manually remove the character.

Such cases are complained in both Windows and Ubuntu. I was wondering what some better ways to accomplish the copy job in both Windows and Ubuntu. For example, will archiving all to be copied into a single archive help? If yes how to do that?

Thanks and regards!