How to Clear Unpinned History on Restart

A clipboard shelf that survives a reboot is convenient for one user and a liability for everyone else. On a shared family PC, a lab workstation, a hot-desk laptop, or a kiosk, the next person to log in should not see the previous user's copies. Edge-Drop's "clear unpinned on restart" toggle is the nuclear hygiene switch: every time Edge-Drop starts, the shelf is empty except for items the user has explicitly pinned. This guide covers when to enable it, what it does to pins, how it differs from auto-delete, and how it pairs with the rest of the privacy stack. For the routine layer see how to set auto-delete timers in Edge-Drop; for the per-copy layer see how to use incognito mode in Edge-Drop.

What clear-on-restart does

The toggle is in the Behaviour tab of the settings panel. When enabled, Edge-Drop performs the following on every startup:

1. Reads the persistent history index from disk.
2. Discards every entry that is not marked pinned.
3. Loads the remaining pinned entries into the in-memory history list.
4. Rewrites the on-disk store so the discarded entries are physically gone, not just hidden.

The user sees an empty shelf the first time they open Edge-Drop after a restart, except for the pinned items. There is no "trash bin" or undo — the items are gone.

The mechanism mirrors what Windows does with Win+V. As Microsoft documents, Windows clipboard history clears unpinned entries on restart by default. Edge-Drop simply extends the same discipline to its own history. See clipboard history cleared after restart: that is normal for the OS-side context.

When to enable it

The decision is mostly a question of who else uses the machine:

• Shared family PC — enable. Multiple users with different accounts, sometimes the same account. Clear-on-restart prevents yesterday's shopping list, banking detail, or private message from showing up the next morning.
• Lab or school PC — enable, and verify with school and work PCs when Win+V is disabled that the OS-side history is also off.
• Hot-desk or pool laptop — enable. The next person to check out the laptop should not see the previous user's clips.
• Personal work laptop, single user — optional. The convenience of cross-day history may outweigh the marginal privacy gain. Most users enable it anyway because the cost is low.
• Personal gaming machine — usually leave off. Little sensitive content, and restarting between sessions is rare.
• Regulated industry workstation (healthcare, finance, legal) — enable, and pair with a 1-hour auto-delete timer. See healthcare and finance clipboard rules of thumb.
• Developer machine handling production credentials — enable. Even if no secret is on the shelf, the principle of least retention applies. See the env file should never touch history.
• Kiosk or public-facing PC — do not install a clipboard shelf at all. Clear-on-restart is not enough; the right answer for kiosks is no third-party clipboard manager.

What it does to pins

Pins survive. That is the point of pinning — the user has explicitly marked these items as worth keeping across restarts. Common pinned sets:

• A small set of frequently-pasted URLs (work wiki, on-call dashboard, status page)
• A code snippet used every day (the SQL query that checks queue depth, the curl to a health endpoint)
• A couple of brand assets for an active design project
• The current project's root file path

Pinning is the override. If clear-on-restart is on, anything you want to keep must be pinned. If you forget to pin, the item is gone after the next restart. For the pin workflow see how to pin and unpin items in Edge-Drop.

A weekly pin review is recommended for users who enable clear-on-restart: stale pins accumulate. See a weekly pin review beats infinite history.

How it differs from auto-delete

The two features are independent and complementary:

With both on, the timer sweeps during the session and clear-on-restart sweeps at startup. The combination gives:

• During the session, items age out per the timer.
• At restart, anything that survived the timer (because the timer was long, or because Edge-Drop was restarted before the threshold elapsed) is cleared.

Most shared-PC setups want both. Most single-user setups want either one or the other — clear-on-restart is usually enough on its own.

How it pairs with the rest of the stack

Clear-on-restart is the bottom of the privacy pyramid. Above it:

• Auto-delete timer — bounds retention during a session.
• Incognito — prevents capture for one-off secrets.
• Pin only what you need — the override layer.
• DPAPI at-rest encryption — always on, protects the on-disk store if the disk is read from outside Windows.

There is also the OS-side stack to keep in mind:

• Win+V enabled/disabled — a separate OS feature with its own retention. If Win+V is on, copies land there regardless of Edge-Drop. See is Windows clipboard history safe.
• Cloud sync — off by default, text-only when on. Should remain off on shared or regulated machines. See how to disable Windows clipboard cloud sync.
• Windows Fast Startup — a hybrid hibernation state that can cause clipboard-history oddities. See clipboard history and fast startup odd wipes explained.

Clear-on-restart in Edge-Drop does not affect Win+V or cloud sync. Those need to be configured at the OS level.

Failure modes

A few behaviours to know about:

• Restart does not mean logout. Clear-on-restart fires when the Edge-Drop process starts, which is typically at Windows login if launch-at-login is enabled. If Edge-Drop is configured not to launch at login, the clear happens whenever the user manually starts it.
• Crash recovery may skip the clear. If Edge-Drop was killed unexpectedly and restarts as part of a crash-recovery flow, the clear behaviour depends on whether the startup code path runs. In practice it does, but it is worth verifying if the workflow depends on it.
• Disabling the toggle does not undelete. Once an item is cleared on restart, it is gone. Re-enabling the toggle later does not bring it back.
• Pinned items are not re-encrypted on clear. The encryption is per-store, not per-item. The store is rewritten without the unpinned entries, but the pinned items' encryption is unchanged.
• Multiple Windows users on one machine — each user gets their own Edge-Drop data folder under %APPDATA%. Clear-on-restart applies per user, not globally.

How to verify it is working

A 30-second test:

1. Enable clear-on-restart in the Behaviour tab.
2. Copy a recognisable string (e.g., TEST-CLEAR-12345) without pinning it.
3. Confirm it appears on the shelf.
4. Quit Edge-Drop (right-click tray icon → Quit).
5. Start Edge-Drop again.
6. Open the shelf. Confirm TEST-CLEAR-12345 is gone.
7. Repeat steps 2-5 with a pinned item. Confirm the pinned item survives.

If the unpinned item survives, check that the toggle is actually saved (close and reopen settings), that you fully quit Edge-Drop rather than just collapsing it, and that no other clipboard manager is shadow-capturing.

What Edge-Drop does not claim

Clear-on-restart is local housekeeping. It does not:

• Erase Win+V history — that needs to be cleared via Settings → System → Clipboard → Clear clipboard data, or via Win+V → Clear all.
• Erase cloud-synced text — that requires disabling cloud sync entirely.
• Provide a forensic wipe. The previous on-disk store is overwritten, but disk-level recovery of pre-overwrite sectors is theoretically possible until they are reused. For pre-sale disk wiping see how to wipe clipboard data before selling a PC.
• Protect against another user with admin rights reading the current store. DPAPI protects against other Windows users, not against an admin who can take ownership of files.
• Provide remote wipe. There is no cloud sync to wipe from.

For workflows that need stronger guarantees, see privacy settings checklist for any clipboard manager and the honest limitations in when not to use Edge-Drop.

Summary

Clear-on-restart is the simplest, lowest-effort privacy control in Edge-Drop. Enable it on any shared, regulated, or hot-desk machine. Pair it with a short auto-delete timer and a small pinned set. The cost is losing yesterday's history; the benefit is that the worst-case retention is bounded to a single session. For single-user personal machines, it is optional — but enabling it costs nothing and removes a class of "what if I forgot to delete that" worries.

Related reading

• How to Keep Edge-Drop Quiet in Fullscreen Games
• How to Turn Sound Effects Off in Edge-Drop
• How to Install Edge-Drop on Windows 10 and 11
• What Local-First Software Means for Clipboard Apps

Sources

• Microsoft Support — Using the clipboard on Windows — confirms that Windows itself clears unpinned history on restart, which Edge-Drop mirrors
• Microsoft Learn — Data Protection API (DPAPI) — documents the at-rest encryption Edge-Drop uses for the on-disk store
• Microsoft Learn — Roaming user profiles and %APPDATA% — reference for the per-user application data layout that gives each Windows user a separate Edge-Drop store
• Electron — safeStorage — the Electron API wrapping DPAPI on Windows
• OWASP — Sensitive data exposure cheat sheet — reference for the kinds of items clear-on-restart is meant to bound

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