Troubleshooting Remote Desktop's Copy/Paste

Thursday, September 01, 2011

If you use Window's RDP to remote into your computer or server regularly, you might have noticed that sometimes the Copy and Paste functionality stops working. This functionality is often needed when you work with remote systems as you would frequently want to copy paste text to search for some help; copy some documents which would be easier to read on your computer than on the slow VPN connection you are connected to or maybe if you want to copy something a backup. Usually, to fix this I have to turn off my session and create a new session, which is really cumbersome. But, recently I found a really easy method to fix this situation here. Here's what you need to do to six the issue:

• Open Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc) on the remote machine.
• Find the "rdpclip" process and kill it.
• Run "rdpclip" to start it again.

Just follow the above steps and your Copy/Paste functionality will start working again between the remote and the host computer. This is a real time-saver when dealing with the issue.

Another alternate is to use a internet clipboard site like cl1p.net, which allows you to create a private clipboard which could be accessed from any computer. Also, I've sometimes used GMail to accomplish this by creating a new draft email and opening it from the other host. These methods are also useful if you want to copy data between different computers.