How an online clipboard works
An online clipboard is a shared text box with a URL. You open the same URL on two devices, type on one, and the text is on the other one a moment later. No account, no installation, nothing to pair. This page explains what happens underneath, and where the limits are.
Boards are just names
Everything on clipboard2.com happens on a board.
A board is nothing more than a name in the URL:
https://clipboard2.com/myboard.
There is no "create" step - opening the URL is what creates the board, and opening it on a
second device is what joins it. A name may be up to 32 characters long and can contain
letters, digits, hyphens and underscores.
That simplicity is also the security model: anyone who knows the name can read the
board. Short names like test or abc get guessed by other
people sooner or later. When the content matters, use a long, unusual name - the suggestion
you get on the home page is random for exactly that reason.
Because a board is only an address, getting it onto a second device is the one fiddly step. Every board therefore shows a QR code of itself next to its name: point a phone camera at the screen and it is on the same board, without anyone typing anything.
Why text appears instantly
While a board is open, it keeps a live line to the server. Whatever you type travels down that line as you write it, and the server passes it straight on to every other device with the same board open. Nobody presses send, nobody reloads anything - the other screen usually shows your sentence before you have finished it.
It works in both directions, but the last person to type wins. Two people writing on one board at the same time will overwrite each other, so a board is a way to hand something over, not a place to write together.
Boards clear themselves
Every board carries a countdown, shown next to its name. When the countdown runs out, the text is wiped and all uploaded files are deleted. On clipboard2.com the lifetime is 1 minutes.
The board itself stays reachable and simply starts a fresh countdown, so you can keep using the same name all day; only the content is short-lived. Nothing is archived: once a board is cleared, that content is gone from the server, and there is no history to recover it from. If you want it gone sooner, the Clear button on the board removes text and files immediately.
Files ride along with the text
A board takes up to 10 files with 100 MB in total. Drop them on the board and they appear on every other device that has it open, with a download link and their own countdown. Files follow the same rule as text: when the board clears, they are deleted from disk.
Uploads are rate limited per network, which keeps the service usable for everyone and makes it unattractive as free file hosting. See the file transfer guide for the details.
It also works without a browser
A board is just a web address, so anything that can fetch a web address can use it. On a computer you only reach through a terminal, one line is enough to read the board:
curl -L clipboard2.com/myboard/text
Invoke-RestMethod https://clipboard2.com/myboard/text
wget -qO- clipboard2.com/myboard/text
python3 -c "import urllib.request as u;print(u.urlopen('https://clipboard2.com/myboard/text').read().decode())"
That makes a board a handy way out of a remote machine: put the text on the board there, read it in your browser here. Everything that is possible this way is written down in the API reference.
What it is not good at
- Not a backup. Content disappears on its own, by design.
- Not secret. The connection is encrypted, but the server has to see your content in order to pass it on, and anyone who knows the board name can read it. Do not paste passwords or anything you would not hand to a stranger.
- Not a shared document. If two people type at once, one of them loses their text.
- Not a large file service. It is built for the file you need on the other device right now, not for a video library.