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.

Over the years I’ve used PuTTY, I’ve installed it on a huge number of computers but I’ve always had one complaint; There isn’t a configuration file I can backup or move to a new machine.

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_USERSoftwareSimonTatham registry key (Simon Tatham is the original developer responsible for PuTTy)

Export the PuTTY registry key on source windows machine

Click on Start -> Run -> regedit -> Click File menu -> Click Export menu-item -> Enter HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareSimonTatham in the “Selected branch” -> Save the putty-registry.reg to your desktop

The file doesn’t contain any passwords or actual SSH key values so, it’s relatively safe from hacker’s eye.

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.