It’s 6:30pm and you’re tired from a long day of work. You’ve just finished writing a four page email to a client. Documenting all of the tasks you completed that day. In fact, you even took time to explain the reason you used nofollow linking to the client’s intranet website. Then, moments later, Mail unexpectedly quits. Your work is gone.

Or… is it. You remember copying the contents of the email to your clipboard minutes before. Quickly you open a new email and anxiously paste:

http://tr.im/OMG_ribbons …

wait, no, surely that can’t be right. You paste again:

http://tr.im/OMG_ribbons …

Then you remember, that co-worker of yours, Taylor, sent you a link on IM (”Haha, d00d this is hilarious”). But for some reason it didn’t format right and you had to copy it.

You think — there must be some solution, assuredly. Yet no, your work is gone. You swear to yourself, “never again.” Fortunately, moments later you find a blog post describing your exact scenario. It suggests downloading the free app Clyppan to record your clipboard history. “Wow, that’s awesome,” you say to yourself, “I’m gonna use this all the time.”

And guess what, you do.

Edit: One note, if you don’t set Clyppan to run on startup via system preferences > accounts, then you’ll have to start it manually every time you login to OS X.

Edit 2: Some might suggest the Quicksilver Clipboard module for this same functionality, however, as of 10.5 that module tends to randomly appear when quitting certain applications. Hence why I moved to Clyppan.