Remote desktop connection is one of the most powerful feature and one of the most commonly used tool in IT industry. I remember when I was in project last year I had to use this lot of times for deployment purpose. One of the hurdles was how to copy files from my local computer to the remote computer. Though FTP etc are good options but I wanted to see my files right from the remote computer as switching between them was pretty difficult ( though there are handy shortcuts for that ).
Thanks to Ashok who told me that you can actually share drives and PnP devices like USB drives etc even if you connect to the local computer after connecting to the remote machine.
- Launch the Remote desktop connection application by typing mstsc in run dialog box.
- Dont connect now but first go to Options which is right below .
- Now navigiate to Local Resources tab. This section lets you confgure what resources you want to share with Remote machine. Its like taking your computer to remote.
- Right below the Local devices and resources there is button which says “More”. Click on it.
- Here we will configure to share drives and Plug and Play Devices even if you connect them later.
- When you expand the drives you would see that you cannot share individual files or folders but the complete drive which will appear as connected or mapped drive in the remote machine.
- Just select the one which you want.
- Click OK and get back to the main screen where you need to configure username and password.
One tip which I would give you from my experice is save the Remote Desktop connection file. This will save your username, password ( optional) and settings which you just configured above. So next time you connect you know your drives are there.
Since the option is not straight away, many users first connect and then disconnect to reconfigure it.
Related : mRemoteNG manages remote desktop connection on multiple tabs
