How to Sync Your Clipboard Between Macs

Two questions get mixed up here. Sharing the thing you just copied between devices is solved by Apple. Sharing your whole clipboard history between Macs is not, and the reasons are worth understanding before you go looking for an app.

What Apple already does

Universal Clipboard copies on one Apple device and pastes on another. Copy on your Mac, paste on your iPhone. It needs both devices signed into the same Apple Account, with Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and Handoff on, and near each other.

It handles the current item only. There is no history, nothing is stored, and if you copy something else the previous item is gone on both devices.

For "get this URL onto my phone", it is the right tool and you already have it.

What it does not do

It does not give you the thing you copied yesterday, on either device. It is a transfer mechanism, not storage.

If Universal Clipboard is not working, the usual causes are Handoff switched off in General settings, Bluetooth off, the devices on different Apple Accounts, or one device being too far away.

Syncing history is a harder problem

Once you want history on two Macs, three real problems appear.

Volume. Clipboard history includes images, screenshots and files. Syncing all of that continuously means moving a lot of data for something you will mostly never look at again.

Privacy. Your clipboard passes through bank details, addresses, private messages and occasionally credentials. Continuously replicating that to another machine, usually via someone's cloud, materially widens where it lives.

Conflicts. Two Macs copying different things at once produces a merge problem with no obviously correct answer.

This is why several clipboard managers either do not sync history at all, or sync only text.

The options

Apps with cross-device sync. Paste and PastePal sync history across Apple devices via iCloud, and that is a genuine reason to choose them if the feature matters more than anything else.

Apps that stay local. Maccy, Flycut, Pastebot, ClipBook and others keep history on the machine that captured it, which is a deliberate privacy position rather than a missing feature.

TypeFire sits in between, and it is worth being precise:

• Snippets sync fully between your Macs, two-way, newest edit wins, through your own iCloud Drive as plain Markdown files
• Text clips can sync, behind a separate switch that is off by default
• Images and files never sync, by design, because that is where the volume and the risk are

One honest caveat: snippets synced through iCloud sit in your own iCloud Drive protected by your Apple Account, not by TypeFire's own encryption, and iCloud Drive is not end-to-end encrypted unless you have turned on Advanced Data Protection.

What most people actually want

Usually not clipboard history sync at all. What they want is for the things they reuse to be on both machines: signatures, addresses, canned replies, code blocks.

Those are snippets, not clips, and snippet sync is a much easier and safer problem. It is a small library of text files rather than a stream of everything you have ever copied, and it does not need to include the screenshot of your bank statement.

If you keep reaching into clipboard history on a second Mac for the same item, that is the signal it should be a snippet. TypeFire lets you promote any clip in one click.

Try it

Snippets sync two-way across your Macs free, with no cap. The clipboard manager is free at your 10 most recent clips.

Download for Mac or read about both halves in one app.