How to Transfer PuTTY Sessions To Another Windows Machine

This is an user contributed article.

PuTTY is a terminal emulator application which can act as a client for the SSH, Telnet, rlogin, and raw TCP computing protocols. You can use putty for remote login or to control your router connected via serial devices.

By default PuTTY stores the session information in the registry on Windows machine. If you have several PuTTY sessions stored in one laptop and would like to transfer those sessions to another laptop, you need to transfer HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SimonTatham registry key and value as explained below:

Export the PuTTY registry key on source windows machine

Click on Start -> Run -> and enter the following regedit command in the run dialog box, which will place the PuTTY registry key and value on your desktop in the putty-registry.reg file. Please note that the name of the registry key (Simon Thatham) is the author of PuTTY.

regedit /e "%userprofile%\desktop\putty-registry.reg" HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Simontatham

You can also launch the registry and interactively export the registry key value as shown below. Click on Start -> Run -> regedit -> Click File menu -> Click Export menu-item -> Enter HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Simontatham in the "Selected branch" -> Save the putty-registry.reg to your desktop.

Import the PuTTY registry key on destination windows machine

Transfer the putty-registry.reg to the destination Windows machine. Right click on the .reg file and select Merge as shown below. This will display a confirmation message: Are you sure you want to add the information in putty-registry.reg to registry?. Click on 'Yes' to accept this message.

Launch the putty to verify the new sessions are transferred successfully. The registry key merge will not delete the previous PuTTY sessions. Instead, it will merge the entries to the existing PuTTY sessions on the destination windows machine.

You can also import the registry key and value interactively: Click on Start -> Run -> regedit -> Click File menu -> Click Import menu-item ->select the putty-registry.reg -> click on Import, to import the PuTTY sessions to the destination windows machine.

Turbocharge PuTTY with 12 Powerful Add-Ons explains about some modified versions of the PuTTY that stores the session information in a file instead of Windows registry.

This article was written by Ramesh Natarajan. At the The Geek Stuff blog he shares his knowledge and experience on Linux and other Geeky stuff. He has more than 15 years of experience in IT industry and has performed very intensive work on Linux system administration, DBA, Hardware and Storage. nixCraft welcomes readers' tips / howtos.

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