Enable Clipboard Sync Across Devices in Windows 10

Recent builds of Windows 10 come with a new Clipboard History feature. It implements a cloud-powered clipboard, which allows syncing your clipboard contents and its history across devices you use with your Microsoft Account. This post explains how to enable this useful feature.

The Cloud Clipboard feature is officially named Clipboard History. It is powered by Microsoft's cloud infrastructure and utilizes the same technologies that made it possible to have your preferences synchronized across your devices, and your files made available everywhere with OneDrive. The company describes it as follows.

Copy paste – it’s something we all do, probably multiple times a day. But what do you do if you need to copy the same few things again and again? How do you copy content across your devices? Today we’re addressing that and taking the clipboard to the next level – simply press WIN+V and you’ll be presented with our brand-new clipboard experience!

Not only can you can paste from the clipboard history, but you can also pin the items you find yourself using all the time. This history is roamed using the same technology which powers Timeline and Sets, which means you can access your clipboard across any PC with this build of Windows or higher.

As of this writing, roamed text on the clipboard is only supported for clipboard content less than 100kb. Currently, the clipboard history supports plain text, HTML and images less than 1MB.

Note: enabling sync across devices for the clipboard will allow Windows 10 to upload your clipboard contents to the cloud. It will be stored on Microsoft's servers. You can change the behavior of the feature using special options Automatically sync text that I copy and Never automatically sync text that I copy. Let's see how it can be done.

To enable Clipboard Sync Across Devices in Windows 10

1. Open the Settings app.
2. Navigate to System - Clipboard.
3. On the right, go to the section Sync across devices.
4. Sign in with your Microsoft account if prompted and click on the Get Started button.
5. Now, enable the toggle option under Sync across devices as shown below.
6. Select Automatically sync text that I copy or Never automatically sync text that I copy according to your preferences.

You are done. Later, you can disable this feature by turning off the option Sync across devices.

If required, you can change the options mentioned above with a Registry tweak. Here is how.

Manage Sync Clipboard Across Devices Options with a Registry Tweak

1. Open the Registry Editor app.
2. Go to the following Registry key.

   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Clipboard

   See how to go to a Registry key with one click.

3. On the right, create a new 32-Bit DWORD value EnableClipboardHistory.
   Note: Even if you are running 64-bit Windows you must still create a 32-bit DWORD value.
   Set its value to 1 to enable the Clipboard History. Note: A value data of 0 will disable it.
4. Now, create or modify the 32-bit value CloudClipboardAutomaticUpload. Its value data accepts the following values: 1 - Automatically sync your clipboard data, 0 - Never automatically sync the clipboard contents.
5. To make the changes done by the Registry tweak take effect, you need to sign out and sign in to your user account.

Here are Registry files you can download to apply the tweak quickly.

Download Registry Files

That's it!