For System Administrators

Information about Clippings for advanced users and system administrators.

Installing the Sync Clippings Helper App For Multiple Users

If there are multiple users on a single machine that want to use Sync Clippings, the setup program for the Sync Clippings Helper app needs to be repeatedly run for each user. To do this, each user will need to log in to the system and run the setup program.

Sync Clippings stores its settings and sync data on a per-user basis, so running the setup program once as a system administrator of the machine will not set up Sync Clippings properly for all users of the machine.

Read-only Sync Clippings

If you're sharing the Sync Clippings data from a folder located on a network drive so that multiple users can access them, it's possible to prevent other users from modifying the data by making the sync file read-only. To do this, set the sync file, named clippings-sync.json, to be read-only using your system's file manager (File Explorer on Windows, Finder on macOS, etc.).

Simply changing the folder containing the sync file to be read-only is not sufficient. The read-only status needs to be set on the sync file, not its containing folder.

NOTE: Setting the sync file as read-only may not work if it is shared from a folder managed by a file sync service such as Dropbox, Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive.

When the sync file is read-only, Clippings Manager won't allow adding, deleting or modifying a clipping or folder located within the Synced Clippings folder. Moving a clipping or folder in or out of the Synced Clippings folder is also not allowed.

Checking the Size of Sync Data From Sync Clippings Helper

The maximum sync data size that can be sent from the Sync Clippings Helper app to Clippings is 1 MiB (or 1024 KiB). Enabling compression of the sync data (which is turned on by default) will allow you to sync more data, but you'll still need to ensure that the sync data stays under the 1 MiB limit, especially if the sync file is large.

new in 7.0.2 You can monitor the size of the sync data by turning on sync data size logging. To turn on sync data size logging:

  1. (Firefox only) Clippings needs to be active to perform the steps below. To ensure that Clippings is in an active state, open Clippings Manager. Once Clippings is running, perform the following steps right away.
  2. Click the Firefox menu and select Add-ons and Themes.
  3. In Add-ons Manager, click the gear icon at the top-right corner of the page and then select Debug Add-ons.
  4. Locate Clippings in the list of installed extensions, then click Inspect to open the extension Developer Tools window.
  5. Click the Storage tab, then on the left pane, expand Extension Storage and click the item directly below it (the item whose label starts with moz-extension://).
  6. On the right pane, locate the key named logSyncDataSize. Double-click its value and change it to true.
  7. Click the Console tab in the Developer Tools window to monitor the log messages from Clippings.

Whenever the Sync Clippings data is updated by reloading the Synced Clippings folder in Clippings Manager or Clippings Sidebar, a message will appear in the Console tab of the Developer Tools window, indicating the size of the sync data expressed in kilobytes. When the sync data size gets closer to 1024 KiB, you should move or delete unused clippings in the Synced Clippings folder to free up space.

If the maximum sync data size is exceeded, syncing will stop, and any new clippings added to the Synced Clippings folder, or any edits to a clipping within this folder, won't be saved to the sync file.

Clippings is unable to prevent adding or modifying a clipping in the Synced Clippings folder when doing so can cause the sync data size to go over the 1 MiB limit. This will be added in a future version of Clippings.