History and privacy
What stays on your Mac, how to hide clips and manage storage.
Your history on your Mac
Buffera stores history locally in ~/Library/Application Support/Buffera/. Ordinary clips are not encrypted by Buffera itself. Local search, image recognition and the built-in assistant do not require sending content to the cloud.
Capture pauses when your Mac locks, switches users or sleeps. Copies accumulated during that time are skipped when you return.
Temporary clips
In Settings → History, Save temporary clips is off by default. Enable it to also save content that apps mark as temporary or automatically generated, for example during dictation and automatic text insertion. The choice applies to new copies and does not delete saved clips.
Secrets in history
Settings → History → Secrets in history defaults to Do not save secrets. You can choose Save secrets encrypted. This applies to new copies; previously saved secrets remain encrypted.
Hide Content encrypts a saved item using AES-256-GCM and removes its content from search indexes. The key stays in macOS Keychain. The date, app and other metadata remain unencrypted.
While an item is hidden, its content is unavailable to search, OCR, the built-in assistant and MCP; you can explicitly copy it in Buffera. Opening its lock returns the item to ordinary history, where these features can use it. It stays visible after closing the window and restarting until you manually hide it again. Neighboring locks do not change.
Manage history storage
Set limits in Settings → History. Available counts are 10, 100, 500, 1,000, 5,000, 10,000, 50,000, or 100,000 ordinary clips. The defaults are 50,000 clips and 5 GB of their content. Cleanup according to the selected limits runs after a new copy. Favorites do not count toward these limits and are not automatically removed.
If you connect an agent
MCP access is off by default. Once you grant permission, an agent can read ordinary clips and safe metadata for hidden clips. Read content enters the external agent’s context and may be sent to its service, depending on the client.