Intent: Informational/troubleshooting, with an urgent fix-it mindset. Archetype: symptom-first diagnostic triage (a “start here, rule out in order” flow) rather than a standard explainer. Duplicate check: I don’t have your content map, so I can’t confirm uniqueness. If you already have a page on “Maccy ignore/privacy settings” or “clear history,” this should link to it rather than duplicate it (see linking notes below).

Maccy Clipboard History Not Saving? Here’s How to Fix It

Quick answer: When Maccy’s history is empty or items vanish, the cause is almost always one of five things: copy events are being ignored, the source app is on the ignore list or marks its data as concealed, “clear history on quit” is on, a storage type is switched off, or macOS is blocking pasteboard access. Check them in that order. Most fixes take under two minutes.

You copy something, hit Shift+Cmd+C, and Maccy App’s list is empty, or the thing you copied ten minutes ago is gone. Before assuming the app is broken, work out which of two different problems you have:

Nothing new gets saved. Maccy isn’t capturing copies at all, or isn’t capturing them from certain apps.
Old items disappear. Items are captured, then removed on quit, on restart, or when you hit a limit.

The steps below separate these quickly. Menu labels vary slightly between Maccy Mac versions, so if something doesn’t match, look for the nearest equivalent tab.

Step 1: Confirm Maccy is actually running

Look for the Maccy Clipboard icon in the menu bar. If it’s missing, the app isn’t running, and nothing can be recorded. Open it from Applications, then enable launch at login (Settings → General) so it survives reboots.

If you hide the menu bar icon, Maccy can still be running. Press your hotkey (default Shift+Cmd+C) to check.

Step 2: Check whether copy events are being ignored

Maccy has a way to pause capturing, and it’s easy to trigger by accident. If the history stopped growing at some point and never resumed, this is a prime suspect. Look at the menu bar icon: a changed or struck-through appearance usually means ignoring is active. Toggle it off and test with a simple copy.

Step 3: Test with plain text from a different app

Copy a sentence from Notes or TextEdit, then open Maccy.

It appears: Maccy works. The problem is specific to the app or content type you were copying from. Go to Steps 4 and 5.
It doesn’t appear: The problem is global. Skip to Steps 6 through 8.

This one test saves a lot of guessing.

Step 4: Check the Ignore settings (the most common cause)

Open Maccy → Settings → Ignore. There are three levers:

Ignored applications. Anything you copy from a listed app is skipped. If you added an app weeks ago and forgot, that’s your answer.
Ignored pasteboard types. Maccy ships with defaults that skip data marked as transient or concealed (for example, types that password managers set so their secrets aren’t stored). That’s deliberate: it’s why a password copied from a password manager doesn’t show up in your history.
Ignored regular expressions. A pattern that’s too broad can silently swallow legitimate copies. If you added one, temporarily remove it and retest.

A real-world gotcha: if copies from one particular app never appear, and that app is a password manager, a terminal tool, or something that handles secrets, it’s probably marking its clipboard data as concealed. That’s the app’s choice, not a Maccy bug, and it protects you. If you genuinely want those items stored, you’d have to loosen the ignored-types list, which is a privacy trade-off. Think twice before doing it.

Step 5: Check which content types Maccy saves

Open Settings → Storage. Maccy lets you choose whether to save text, images, and files. If you copy a screenshot and nothing appears, check whether the image option is off. The same goes for copied files in Finder.

Step 6: Look for “clear history on quit”

If items are there during the day but gone after you quit or restart Maccy, you almost certainly have a clear-on-quit option enabled (look in Settings → General or Storage, depending on version). Turn it off.

Related: Maccy has a keyboard shortcut and menu command to clear history. If you or a colleague with access to your Mac triggered it by accident, items would disappear all at once.

Step 7: Check the history size limit

Under Settings → Storage, Maccy has a history size setting (the default is 200 items, if I recall correctly). Once the list is full, the oldest unpinned items drop off to make room. If you copy a lot (code snippets, logs), older entries can vanish faster than you expect.

The fix: raise the limit, and pin anything you can’t afford to lose. Pinned items are meant to stay put.

Step 8: Check macOS permissions and pasteboard privacy

Recent macOS releases have been tightening how apps read the clipboard in the background. If Maccy used to work and stopped after a macOS update, look in System Settings → Privacy & Security for a pasteboard or “Paste from Other Apps” style control, and make sure Maccy is allowed.

Also confirm that Maccy has the Accessibility permission if you use auto-paste. This affects pasting rather than recording, but a half-working permission setup often gets misdiagnosed as “history not saving.”

Step 9: Rule out duplicate installs

If you installed Maccy more than once (say, from the Mac App Store and via Homebrew or a direct download), you may have two separate copies with separate histories. You might be looking at the empty one. Check Applications and Activity Monitor for multiple Maccy processes, keep one, and remove the other.

Step 10: Restart, update, then reset as a last resort

In order:

Quit and reopen Maccy.
Update to the latest release. Clipboard bugs often get fixed upstream, and Maccy is open source, so you can check the release notes and open issues on GitHub.
Reset preferences only if nothing else worked, because this discards your settings. Back up anything you care about first.

If you reach this point and the problem is reproducible, file a GitHub issue with your macOS version, Maccy version, and the exact app you were copying from. That’s the most useful thing you can give a maintainer.

Quick symptom → cause table
What you see	Most likely cause	Where to look
Nothing saves from any app	Ignoring enabled, or app not running	Menu bar icon, Step 2
Nothing saves from one app	App on ignore list or concealed data	Settings → Ignore
Screenshots/files missing	Content type disabled	Settings → Storage
Everything gone after restart	Clear on quit	Settings → General/Storage
Old items vanish over time	History size limit	Settings → Storage
Stopped after macOS update	Pasteboard privacy	System Settings → Privacy & Security
Empty list, history “exists” elsewhere	Duplicate installs	Applications, Activity Monitor
Is this a bug or working as designed?

Honestly, it’s usually working as designed. Maccy is built to be conservative: it’s local-first, it skips sensitive data by default, and it keeps a bounded list. Those choices are the reason many people trust it, but they’re also the reason “missing” items are so often explained by a setting rather than a defect. If you’ve worked through the steps above and it still misbehaves, it’s worth reporting.

If you’re not sure which setting you changed, which of these steps turned out to be the culprit for you?

Andrea Reetz