Tuesday, July 31, 2012

File transfer through Windows Remote Desktop client

I can't believe I have never known about this feature of the Windows Remote Desktop client. I have been using Windows since version 3.1 and I use the Remote Desktop client (RDP) almost everyday at work. I have done an informal poll of several people I work with and none of them knew about this either. The feature I am talking about is mapping local drives to a remote machine using only the Remote Desktop client. I only ran across this myself while doing some reading about managing Amazon EC2 instances. I'm not sure why this feature is buried so deep in the options. Anyway here is how to use it:


Launch Remote Desktop and click on the 'Local Resources' tab.

I have used the Local Resources tab many times to change printer and audio settings. That 'More...' button hides some neat features. Click on 'More...' 

After clicking 'More...' you will have a list of all the drives available on your local PC. Check the box next to the drives you want to have mapped to the remote system.

After you have made the Remote Desktop connection to the remote machine this is how the drive appears on the remote system. There is an 'Other' section in the list of drives. Now you can to copy files back and forth to the remote system directly through the Remote Desktop client connection!

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