How to Transfer Your Putty Settings Between PCs Running Windows

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had people ask me how they can export their Putty settings. For those of you who have been completely in the dark for the last decade, Putty is a Telnet and SSH client for Windows and Unix. Below I outline the steps to accomplish this goal; these steps should work for all versions of Windows. Putty stores the client settings in the Windows registry. The below steps are something of a hack to export and then import your Putty settings to a different PC since Putty doesn’t have the built in functionality to do this. A word of advice – you should be very careful when working with the Windows registry as you can cause severe problems if you make any incorrect modifications.

1. From the command prompt, type “regedit” and hit “Enter”
2. Once the “regedit” GUI pops up, hit “Ctrl-F” and type in “Simon Tatham”. Simon is the original developer of Putty. Make sure only the “Keys” checkbox is selected and click “Find Next”.

Searching for the Putty settings in the Windows registry

3. Eventually a folder named “SimonTatham” will be found and highlighted on the left pane of the “regedit” GUI. Simply right click it and select “Export”. Save the file with whatever name you like such as “putty.reg”.
4. To import the setting onto a computer that already has Putty installed, simply right click the file and select “Merge”. Your Putty settings have now been transferred to another PC.