Do I understand you correctly that you’re running a server system completely without a GUI (console only) ? Then copy and paste does not really exist at this level. You can run gpm (general purpose mouse; it’s in the repositories, so ‘sudo apt-get install gpm’ should install it) to get a mouse cursor and a X-like select-and-paste mechanism on the console (left mb to select, middle mb to paste; on a device with only two buttons the right mb will do paste and the function normally mapped to the right button (extend selection) is not available).
Beyond this there’s the kill-ring in the command line editor for cutting and pasting in your input. Ctrl-k kills from cursor to end of line, ctrl-u kills from cursor to the beginning of the line, ctrl-w kills from the cursor to the beginning of the word; hitting ctrl-w multiple times will not be seen as starting a new item but will add the word to the text already in the current item. Ctrl-y ‘yanks’ the last kill back into the line, Meta(or Alt)-y allows you to replace a yanked kill with the next older kill (this can be done repeatedly, all killed bits of text sit in a ring buffer; do Alt-y often enough and you’ll get back to the most recent kill). I should probably also mention that the command line has a history feature. The cursor-up and cursor-down keys allow you to move back and forth in the history and you can use ctrl-r to do an incremental backward search in the command history.
Another thing to remember is that anything a program prints to the console can be put in a file by using redirection e.g. ‘ls -l /var/log/*.gz > packedLogs.txt’ will give you a detailed listing of compressed files in the log-directory in a file named packedLogs.txt. You can then load that file into an editor and do whatever is needed.
Another way would be to set up an ssh-server on the console only machine and then work on the server from a client with a GUI using an ssh client.