Easiest Way to Retrieve Lost Copy Paste Data

This article will go over the best way to enable a clipboard manager and clipboard history, ensuring you are able to retrieve your lost copy paste data.

If you are on Windows, I recommend checking out a previous article of ours: How to Turn On Windows Clipboard History. We go over how you can use ⊞ Win + V to enable your clipboard manager, track your history, and retrieve any data you may need.

However, if you are not on Windows, or if you copied items recently, or reset your computer, or anything else, you may be in trouble.

Unfortunately, there is no easy way to retrieve your lost copy-paste data. As we have written about before, clipboard technology and managers for computers have not evolved since the 1980s! Therefore, unless you are on windows, it is unlikely that your operating system has saved your clipboard history.

I realize that this is annoying and possibly frustrating, but I want to talk about what you can do next:

Get a Clipboard Manager

There are many out there. Clipboard History Pro is the best, in our opinion. I mean, we did build the extension!

We have a fantastic free version, where you can keep an unlimited number of items on your clipboard. Even if you copied an item months back, you can go back and search through your previous clips to find what you are looking for.

With our extension, you’ll also be able to synchronize copied data, use a text expander, and be fully protected. We have shortcuts and widgets to make the clipboard easy to bring up, and support all major browsers.

Why not Chrome Itself?

So Chrome does have a clipboard. However, it has been a practice since the 1960s (!!) to override the most recent data in your clipboard.

Unfortunately, despite copy/paste operations being one of the most common in computers (on the scale of 100 billion every year!), developers have serially neglected this area.

There are always cooler things to work on. Or things that are easier to market for the new devices out there. Historically, the copy-paste industry has always leaned on third parties to help them complete this basic function.