Relic uses a handful of words for everything it does. Learn those and the rest of the app explains itself.
An item, or a relic
An item is one thing you copied or sent to Relic. A line of text, a password, a link, a screenshot, a PDF, an address, a command you will need again. The app calls one of these a relic, which is where the name comes from, and you will see the word in a few places (the search box says Search relics).
Every item carries a little more than the thing itself: a title, the device it came from, when it arrived, and any tags. You can edit all of that. None of it is required, and Relic fills most of it in for you.
History and the Vault
There are two piles, and one switch in the window flips between them.
- History is everything Relic picked up on its own. You did not ask for any of it, and most of it you will never look at again. That is fine. It is there for the one time you need it.
- The Vault is the items you chose to keep. Keeping one marks it as yours on purpose. Kept items never expire on any plan, and they are the ones worth naming and tagging. The Vault goes into it properly.
A small gold gem at the right of a row means the item is kept. Click it to keep an item, click it again to let it back into history. Anything you add by hand (a note you typed, a file you dropped in) is kept from the start, because you clearly meant it.
On a computer and on a phone
On Windows, a Mac or Linux, Relic captures by itself. Copy anything, in any app, by any means, and it is already saved before you paste it. You never press a button to save something. Press Ctrl + Shift + Q and the window opens over whatever you are doing. What gets captured covers the edges.
A phone does not allow that. Neither Android nor iPhone lets an app read the clipboard in the background, so on a phone you send things in: share to Relic from any app, or paste into it. Everything else works the same, and the whole vault is there to search. See capture on Android and capture on iPhone.
Search and sync
Search runs on the device you are holding, against a copy of your own vault, so it is instant and works with no connection at all. You can search by a word you remember, by roughly what the thing was, by the day you copied it, or by the words inside a screenshot. Search shows you how.
Sync is optional. Relic is a perfectly good app on one computer with no account at all. Turn sync on and your vault appears on your other devices, sealed on the device it left so that only your devices can read it. Nobody at Relic can, and neither can anyone who takes the server. How sync works has the details.
How much Relic keeps
Kept items never expire. History does, on the free plan: it holds a rolling window of what you copied most recently, and older items drop off the end as new ones arrive. The free plan also caps how many items you can keep at once, at a limited number. Paid plans lift both.
Nothing you kept is ever thrown away to make room. When you run out of storage, Relic turns the new item away and tells you why, so the things you chose to keep stay where they are.
The words Relic uses
- Relic
- One item. A piece of text, an image, a file, or a link. The app uses the word in a few places, and this help uses “item” everywhere else.
- History
- Everything captured automatically, newest first. The All switch in the window shows it.
- Vault
- The items you kept on purpose. They never expire. The Vault switch shows only these.
- Keep
- Move an item from history into the Vault. The gold gem on a row does it.
- Tag
- A short label on an item, like #receipt. Relic adds some for you and you can add your own.
- Snippet
- A kept item you reuse often. Tick Save as snippet when you edit it and typing its title in the picker brings it to the top.
- Device
- One computer or phone signed in to your account. Rows show which device an item came from.
Where to go from here:
- The Relic window is a tour of every part of the window, the tray menu included.
- Keyboard shortcuts lists every key, on all three desktop platforms.
- Settings: General covers the switches most people change first.