The Windows clipboard is limited to a single reference which means that it is overwritten each time you copy text, images or other data to the clipboard.
While that may be sufficient for many use cases, it is limiting for others. For instance, if you want to copy the title of this page and its url, you would have to perform two copy and paste operations to do so in the form copy title > paste title > copy url > paste url. Not that user friendly as you may have to switch between programs to do so.
That’s one reason why third-party clipboard managers are available. Clipdiary, which was mentioned at Tech Yard, is such a program.
It enhances the clipboard functionality of the Windows Clipboard in several ways. While it works just like the original when it comes to copying information to the clipboard, it is using storage to store more than one entry.
This means that you can copy as many as 3000 different entries to the clipboard and access them later on using the application without losing any of the copied entries.
The default limit is set to 3000 but you may change that to another number if you like. Remember that information are saved permanently by the program until the limit is reached, or entries are deleted by you manually.
The keyboard shortcuts Ctrl-c and Ctrl-v work in the program so that you don’t have to learn new shortcuts. Ctrl-v pastes the last saved entry automatically and if you want to paste older entries you can use Ctrl-d to bring up the application interface and copy those from there.
The latter is a bit cumbersome; options to paste the last ten or so entries using shortcuts would be quite handy as they would improve the program’s usability.
The main program interface supports search which is necessary considering that you may store thousands of entries in the program’s database. You may also enable advanced search which adds a format option to the search so that only pictures, plain text or file lists are returned by it.
Update: Clipdiary is no longer available as a free application. A personal license is available for $19.99. Check out the free alternatives Clipjump or Clipboard Help+Spell instead.