It only took me one or two disasters in losing huge blocks of copied text to cave in and download a third-party clipboard manager for Windows. While there are many, like ClipTrap, I’ve found that plenty of them have poor interfaces or indexing options that are not very featureful.

Just the other day, I stumbled across a new one by the name of Save.me. At first, Save.me doesn’t come across as a clipboard manager. Save.me interacts with the clipboard to archive all of the data you copy, sort it by media type, and store it for you forever. If you’ve used other clipboard monitors and handlers on Windows, this one should be an entirely unique experience.

Save.me

I’m not going to lie to you. The Save.me website is a little lackluster.

Let’s not judge a book by its cover though. Tucked away in those 4.6 MB downloads, for both 32 and 64-bit versions of Windows, is a clean and effective little application that saves and organizes data that I often find to be incredibly important.

Save.me can be extracted to a flash drive and it’ll work just fine. The application is completely portable in both versions.

Upon launching the application, you should be at the Wizard screen where you’re prompted, by a text field, to enter your name.

If you’ve got data that already exists as copied to your clipboard, it should immediately be the first item that is indexed within Save.me. To check, go to the Default tab on the left and under the Views header. If you’ve got nothing there, pick any file, URL, or block of text to copy onto your clipboard. You should definitely see a change to the page now.

Here’s where Save.me gets cool and strays away from other clipboard monitors and handlers. Save.me actually has a unique preview for a wide range of different types of clipboard content: URLs, folders, images, and more.

As you can see here, the URL of a MakeUseOf article was copied to the clipboard. Rather than just plainly displaying the URL, Save.me actually shows a frame with an active preview of that URL.

It works just as effectively when you copy an image, as you can see below where I copied a screenshot of the author’s homepage.

Each item shows a caption, where the contents are from, what application it was copied from, the date it was copied, and the size of the copied contents. You can also mark an item as a favorite or protected item, for easier access or for sensitive data that you want secured.

The Logbook view is also very interesting, giving you a calendar-style breakdown of exactly when data was copied to your clipboard and thus saved to Save.me.

And of course this clipboard monitoring application wouldn’t be complete without a way to search through all of your saved data for certain keywords, which can easily be accomplished at the bottom-left of the main interface on the Default view, or in plain sight in the Wizard view.

Save.me offers a really unique experience to capturing and visualizing all of the contents of your clipboard. What do you guys think of this method of managing the Windows clipboard? Let me know in the comments!