Maccy Migration Checklist 2026: Moving to a New Mac or Switching from Another Clipboard Manager

Quick answer: Maccy has no official history export, so a migration means moving your settings and pins (and, optionally, the raw data folder), then re-granting Accessibility permission on the new Mac. Install Maccy App, restore its preferences, re-check your Ignore rules, and test one paste. Most people finish in under 15 minutes.

What does “migration” mean for a clipboard manager?

A clipboard manager holds three different things, and they migrate differently:

The honest advice: a clipboard history is closer to a scratchpad than an archive. If something in it matters long term, it should have been pinned or saved somewhere real. That makes a “fresh start plus pins” migration the sensible default.

Phase 1: Before you touch the new Mac

1. Write down your shortcut and key settings

Open Maccy Mac‘s settings from the menu bar icon (or the shortcut, which defaults to Shift+⌘+C) and screenshot each tab. A five-second screenshot beats trying to remember whether you set history to 200 or 500 items. Pay particular attention to:

• Your custom open-popup shortcut
• History size and sort order
• Whether you paste directly on selection or only copy
• Everything under Ignore (see Phase 3)

2. Review your pins

Pins are the only history-like data most people truly want to keep. Open Maccy Clipboard, look at each pinned entry, and copy any irreplaceable text into a notes app or a plain text file as a backup. This is the safest “export” Maccy offers, because it works regardless of internal storage format.

3. Note how you installed it

Maccy is distributed through Homebrew, GitHub releases, and the Mac App Store. Run brew list --cask | grep maccy to see whether Homebrew manages it. Reinstall the same way on the new Mac: the App Store build is sandboxed, which changes where data lives, so mixing sources makes file-level migration unreliable.

Phase 2: Move Maccy to the new Mac

4. Quit Maccy first

Quit from the menu bar icon before copying any files. Copying a database while the app is writing to it is a classic way to corrupt it.

5. Install Maccy on the new Mac

brew install --cask maccy

Or download the latest release from the project’s GitHub page. Launch it once, then quit it, so the app creates its folders and a clean preference file.

6. Restore preferences

Maccy stores settings in macOS user defaults, in a property list named after its bundle identifier. The cleanest way to carry it across is defaults:

# On the OLD Mac
defaults export org.p0deje.Maccy ~/Desktop/maccy-prefs.plist

# On the NEW Mac (with Maccy quit)

defaults import org.p0deje.Maccy ~/Desktop/maccy-prefs.plist
killall cfprefsd

Using defaults rather than copying files out of ~/Library/Preferences matters, because macOS caches preferences in a daemon and may overwrite a hand-copied file. If you do not trust the command line, skip this step and re-enter settings from your screenshots.

7. (Optional) Restore history and pins from the data folder

This is the unofficial, at-your-own-risk route. Maccy keeps clipboard data in a local database inside its application data folder. The exact location and format have changed between major versions and depend on your install source. If you go this way:

• Use the same Maccy version on both Macs. A newer version may migrate or reject an older store.
• Copy the whole data folder, not individual files, with Maccy quit on both machines.
• Keep the original untouched until a paste test passes.

If anything looks wrong, delete the copied data and fall back to the “fresh start plus manually re-created pins” approach. You lose nothing you could not afford to lose.

Phase 3: Re-grant permissions and re-check privacy rules

8. Re-grant Accessibility permission

macOS permissions do not travel with files or backups. Maccy needs Accessibility access to paste directly into the frontmost app. Go to System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility, add or enable Maccy, and restart the app. The most common post-migration symptom is “Maccy copies but won’t paste”, and a missing permission is almost always the cause.

9. Re-enable launch at login

Check Maccy’s settings for the launch-at-login option, or confirm it under System Settings → General → Login Items.

10. Audit your Ignore rules

This is the step people skip, and it is the one with real privacy consequences. Maccy lets you exclude specific apps, clipboard content types, and (in recent versions) patterns from being recorded. After migrating, confirm:

• Your password manager is still excluded, even if it already marks its copies as concealed.
• Any banking, 2FA, or secrets-handling apps you excluded before are excluded again.
• Copying a password from your password manager does not appear in history. Test this explicitly.

Phase 4: Verify it works

Switching from another clipboard manager to Maccy

If you are migrating to Maccy from something else, the logic is the same: history rarely transfers cleanly, so plan around that.

1. Export what matters from the old tool. Snippets or saved items usually can be exported or copied by hand. Maccy has no snippet system of its own beyond pins, so decide which snippets become pins and which belong in a text expander.
2. Run both for a day. Two clipboard managers fighting over the same pasteboard can cause duplicate entries. Quit the old one once you have captured what you need.
3. Rebuild your shortcut habit. Set Maccy’s hotkey to match your old one so muscle memory carries over.
4. Know the trade-offs. Maccy is deliberately minimal: local-only storage, no cloud sync, a lightweight search-first popup. If you relied on cross-device sync or rich snippet folders, you may want a complementary tool rather than a full replacement. macOS’s Universal Clipboard handles one-off copies between Apple devices, but it is not a history.

Common questions

Can I export my Maccy clipboard history?

There is no official export feature that I can confirm. The practical options are copying the app’s data folder between identical versions, or backing up pins manually.

Will my history sync between Macs?

No. Maccy stores data locally and does not sync through iCloud. That is a privacy feature rather than an oversight, but it means every Mac keeps its own history.

Why does Maccy copy but not paste on the new Mac?

Almost always the Accessibility permission. Re-enable it under Privacy & Security, then relaunch Maccy.

Do I need to migrate at all?

Often not. Installing fresh, restoring settings, and re-creating a handful of pins takes less time than debugging a database copy, and you leave behind weeks of clutter.

The short version

Treat migration as moving habits, not data: your shortcut, your pins, your Ignore rules, and one permission toggle. Everything else in a clipboard history is disposable by design. If you only do one thing from this checklist, test that your password manager’s copies stay out of history.

Ready to set up? Grab Maccy from the GitHub repository, or run the Homebrew command above. What would you want a future Maccy version to export first: pins, history, or settings?