8.2.10 Saving your private key to a disk file

Once you have generated a key, set a comment field and set a passphrase, you are ready to save your private key to disk.

Press the ‘Save private key’ button. PuTTYgen will put up a dialog box asking you where to save the file. Select a directory, type in a file name, and press ‘Save’.

This file is in PuTTY's native format (*.PPK); it is the one you will need to tell PuTTY to use for authentication (see section 4.22.1) or tell Pageant to load (see section 9.2.2).

(You can optionally change some details of the PPK format for your saved key files; see section 8.2.13. But the defaults should be fine for most purposes.)