How to log clipboard entries on Windows 10
Clipboard entries generally do not need to be logged. In fact, apps that log them are usually malicious in nature. That said, if you do need to log your clipboard entries to a text file, the easiest way to do it is with ClipLogger. ClipLogger can maintain a log of all text that’s copied to your clipboard. Since it is a text-based log, any file that you copy to the clipboard is included as a file path. Here’s how it works.
Log clipboard entries
Download ClipLogger and run it. The app doesn’t need to be installed. By default, it will log both text and files but you have the option to log just the text or just the files. The app doesn’t save the entries to a text file by default. To enable the feature, click the Settings button at the bottom left.
On the Settings window, enable the ‘Backup contents to file’ option. The app will create a new text file in the same folder that its EXE is in and it will write to it recursively. You can limit how many items are logged from the ‘Max logged length’ field.
Minimize the app to the system tray and it will work in the background. You can view your clipboard history in the app’s interface.
The log file is going to be simple; each entry will show what date and time text or a file was copied.
ClipLogger has an option in its settings to run the app at startup and while it may be useful, we strongly discourage users from enabling it. If you’re going to maintain a log of everything that is copied to your clipboard, you should be aware that you’re doing it. To have a clipboard logging app run at startup without you consciously running it might make you forget you have it running and cause problems later.
On that note, we have to caution you about what items you copy to your clipboard. If you copy sensitive information to your clipboard, it’s a good idea to have a way to scrub it immediately. There’s an app that can periodically clear the clipboard on Windows 10 that you should consider using with ClipLogger if you tend to copy sensitive information often. The two will work perfectly together because ClipLogger does not log an item to the clipboard until a new item has been copied to it. This means that if the item is scrubbed clean before a new one is copied, it likely will not be included in the log.
