Export/Import Putty Sessions

If you’re like me you probably use one machine heavily. You have all of the hosts and devices which you connect to regularly, saved in Putty. but what if you want to conveniently share all of those saved settings with a coworker, or back them up so you can restore them in the future to a new PC.

Putty saves all of those ‘saved’ sessions in the Windows registry. While you’re not able to export them directly from Putty, you can use the command line to export either just the sessions, or all settings, from putty.

Note: These instructions only work with the ‘regular’ installed version of Putty on Windows. They will not work with the portable version.

Export

Open a Command Prompt (or PowerShell) as an Administrator.

Export only sessions with this command:

regedit /e "%USERPROFILE%\Desktop\putty-sessions.reg" HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SimonTatham\PuTTY\Sessions

Export all settings with this command

regedit /e "%USERPROFILE%\Desktop\putty.reg" HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SimonTatham

This will create a “reg” file on the desktop of the current user. It will not export SSH keys. Do not replace “SimonTathom” with your username, Simon is the author of Putty and that is the name that particular folder inside the registry where the settings are saved.

Import

Copy the reg file to the machine which you want to import the putty settings on.

Double-click on the .reg file and accept the import.