PuTTY is a free implementation of Telnet and SSH for Win32 and Unix platforms, along with an xterm terminal emulator. It is written and maintained primarily by Simon Tatham. Official PuTTY site is: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/. PuTTY is an open source software and its free, licensed under MIT license.

I’ve been using PuTTY for years, its easy to use. So far, only one disadvantage I found. It really pain to copy PuTTY settings one by one from one Windows machine to another. Especially when you have a lot of entries saved in there.

Here I’ll write a trick to backup and restore PuTTY settings from one Windows machine to another. This trick tested on Windows XP and Vista.

You’ll need administrator access to both machines as we will be using Windows Registry Editor to backup and restore. Windows Registry Editor is a powerful tools, please be careful with anything you do.

Here we go…

To backup:
[*] Windows XP:
Click Start Menu >> Run
Windows Vista:
Click Start Menu >> Start Search box
[*] Type:
regedit
[*] Hit Enter or Return key, it will open Windows Registry Editor
[*] Navigate to:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SimonTatham
[*] Right click on “SimonTatham” key >> Export
[*] Save as putty.reg and put it somewhere.

To restore:
[*] Copy/transfer putty.reg to another machine which already have PuTTY installed.
[*] Double click putty.reg file to import the entries to registry

Done, good luck!