Privacy & Retention

Cinch captures every text or image clip you copy on this Mac and keeps it in a local history you can search and re-use. This page explains what gets captured, what gets skipped, and how long clips live.

Retention

By default, Cinch keeps local clips for 30 days. Older clips are deleted automatically by a background sweep that runs once per hour.

Cinch also tracks a separate remote retention setting for clips synced through the relay server. In this release the remote retention slider saves your preference locally; the relay honours the server-side value in the next release.

Local retention

Open the Settings pane (the gear icon in the top bar). You can choose from discrete retention windows: 7, 14, 30, 60, or 90 days. Lowering a retention value deletes clips older than the new window after you confirm the change.

You can also clear every local clip in one action. The Settings pane’s Clear local history button opens a confirmation dialog with the current clip count.

What Cinch skips

Cinch never saves:

• Clips from known password managers: 1Password (com.1password.1password, com.agilebits.onepassword7), Bitwarden (com.bitwarden.desktop), LastPass (com.lastpass.LastPass), and Keychain Access (com.apple.keychainaccess).
• Any clip whose NSPasteboard type includes org.nspasteboard.ConcealedType or org.nspasteboard.TransientType. These are the conventional macOS signals that a clipboard item is confidential (passwords) or momentary (2FA codes).

If you copy a password from a supported password manager and do not see it in Cinch’s history, that is the exclusion working as intended.

Where clips are stored

Local clips live in a SQLite database under ~/Library/Application Support/com.cinch.app/clips.db. Cinch relies on macOS FileVault (the built-in disk encryption that most Macs enable by default) for at-rest protection of the database. Turn FileVault on in System Settings if it is not already.

macOS-only in this release

The Cinch desktop app ships for macOS only in this release. If you use Linux or Windows, install the cinch CLI instead:

curl -fsSL https://cinchcli.com/install.sh | sh

The CLI supports push and pull on all three platforms. A Linux and Windows desktop build returns in a follow-up release.