From a terminal window use the 'tar' command. Type 'man tar' at the prompt to see its full usage. It works similar to a zip/sit archive, without compression, but does retain file date/permission/owner/directory structure information. You can tar up your files in one directory and untar them somewhere else.. if you're moving it within the same system, there is a way to do this without even creating a .tar file by piping the output of the tar process into an untar process but I don't know exact syntax off hand, maybe a unix guru can help out with this? The .tar file you create can easily be transferred to another system though and untarred at its destination. On an interesting side note there is also a 'ditto' command which I believe copies files retaining all the mentioned information and can also retain mac resource forks...
