Help me recover text I lost from a copy and paste error

May 5, 2008 12:55 PM

I just had a huge block of text on my clipboard. When going to paste it, I accidentally hit apple-c instead of apple-v ... copying a new block of text. Is there any way I can recover the text I just erased from the clipboard? I'm on a Mac running OSX.
posted by jeffmshaw to computers & internet (10 comments total)

No, sorry.
posted by xil at 1:01 PM on May 5, 2008

It's possible (or used to be possible) to "upgrade" your clipboard into more fancy clipboards with history, but there's nothing you can retroactively do now.
posted by kosmonaut at 1:02 PM on May 5, 2008

I was afraid of that. Just discovered iClip, too late. Thanks anyway!
posted by jeffmshaw at 1:04 PM on May 5, 2008

What were you editing the text in when you copied it out? On a windows machine, you can usually just hit 'ctrl+z' in an editor text box in order to 'undo' the edits you just did, and that often works even in applications that don't have an undo menu option.

So, if you were typing in word, you could just go back to your word window, and hit ctrl+z.

I don't know if that would work on a mac.
posted by delmoi at 1:35 PM on May 5, 2008

If you cut the text from somewhere you might be able to mac-z in that application to undo the cutting
posted by captaincrouton at 1:35 PM on May 5, 2008

ctrl-z would be the first thing I would try. If you had cut it from a file, and not saved that file yet, you could revert the file (or close it w/o saving).
posted by drjimmy11 at 1:45 PM on May 5, 2008

If you're running Quicksilver, you might want to avail yourself of its clipboard plugin.
posted by adamrice at 1:48 PM on May 5, 2008

Sadly, I don't know how to get your lost text back, either. But if you're looking for the future, I really love PTH Pasteboard -- and it's free!
posted by rdn at 2:03 PM on May 5, 2008

For the record, I did try apple-z. No soap. Sigh. Next time!
posted by jeffmshaw at 2:07 PM on May 5, 2008

If you happened to hit cmd-c while not having actually selected anything, the contents of the clipboard doesn't change.
posted by o2b at 2:33 PM on May 5, 2008