recursive copy with spaces in descendants

[Chris]

I apologize for the lack of detail. The command I'm using is:
( cd /usr/local/etc/transmission/home/Downloads/ ; tar cf - . ) | ( cd
/mnt/usb ; tar xf - )

I've also tried:
cp -afv /usr/local/etc/transmission/home/Downloads /mnt/usb
rsync -aq /usr/local/etc/transmission/home/Downloads /mnt/usb
find . -print0 | xargs -0 -I "{}" cp "{}" /mnt/usb #when in source directory

Filesystem on USB drive is FAT32, 32k blocksize, 16GB capacity,
formatted on a Windows 7 box.