PasteDaemon Help

Sync

Sync

PasteDaemon can keep your Macs in step through iCloud. Switch it on in Preferences → Sync, on each Mac you want syncing.

What travels

  • Your actions, triggers, abbreviations and themes.
  • Your variables, including secrets.
  • The clipboard history, with its pins and its pictures.
  • The settings that mean the same thing on every Mac — how long things are kept, your shortcuts, your sounds, your theme, the apps you have excluded.

What stays on one Mac

  • The search bar's command history.
  • Your licence and your API key.
  • The settings that are about one machine: where the overlay was last put down, which port the API listens on, whether the menu bar icon is showing, and whether you have been through the first-launch walkthrough.

Switching it on

Each Mac is switched on from that Mac. Open Preferences → Sync and turn on Sync this Mac. The first time, whatever is already in iCloud is merged with what that Mac has rather than replacing it — see below.

The Macs list shows every Mac that has ever synced. You can turn another Mac off from here, which stops it syncing the next time it looks, and Forget a Mac you no longer have.

When two Macs have been apart

Both Macs' work is kept. Nothing is silently dropped in favour of whichever synced last:

  • The same variable name on both becomes one variable holding the newer value, with the older one still in its history — one undo away.
  • The same text copied on both is one row in the history, and a pin either Mac gave it survives.
  • Two different actions written under one keyword are both kept, and the second gets a number on the end — slug and slug-2 — because a keyword has to mean one thing when you type it.
  • Two different expansions for one abbreviation are both kept, and the later one is switched off. You can see both in the Abbreviations pane and switch on whichever you meant.

PasteDaemon tells you when it has had to do the last two.

Secrets

Secrets are not in iCloud as plain text. Each Mac has its own vault, and a secret is sealed separately for each Mac that syncs — so reading one still asks for Touch ID on the Mac in front of you.

A Mac that has just started syncing cannot read secrets that already existed until a Mac that can read them has been unlocked once; that happens the next time you use a secret there, and needs nothing of you beyond what it normally asks.

How private it is

What PasteDaemon puts in iCloud is encrypted end to end: the keys live in your iCloud Keychain rather than on a server, so Apple cannot read your clipboard history, your snippets or your settings. Pictures and very long copies are encrypted by PasteDaemon itself before they are uploaded.

Turning a Mac off in the pane stops that Mac syncing. It is not a lock: any Mac signed in to your Apple ID that runs PasteDaemon could read what is in iCloud. If that matters, sign that Mac out of iCloud, or delete the iCloud data.

Stopping

  • Sync this Mac, switched off, leaves everything on that Mac exactly as it is and leaves iCloud's copy for your other Macs.
  • Delete iCloud Data… removes the copy in iCloud and stops syncing everywhere. Every Mac keeps the history, actions and settings it already has.

There is no way to get the iCloud copy back afterwards, and nothing is lost by that: every Mac holds the whole of what it syncs.