[Blind-sysadmins] backing up a windows box with system rescue

Hello, With my ongoing saga of the laptop i'm now having to back it up prior to a reinstall. I've got system restore which has mounted both the laptop's ntfs hd and an external usb hd also ntfs read/write using ntfs-3g. We're doing a cp -R source destination. My problem that i just thought of is that some of the files and folders the microsoft ones under documents and settings have special characters in them, braces. I need a complete backup of this system, so am thinking this copy is eventually going to error out. I need an alternative. Suggestions welcome! Some urgency! Thanks. Dave.