Tracking numbers, recipes, codes: never lose them again

It is never the important document you lose. It is the parcel number from Tuesday, the name of the hotel your friend sent, the discount code on a page you closed, the recipe you swore you would cook this weekend. Small things, seen once, that never got saved anywhere.

The tracking number

Carriers generally can’t look up a parcel by your name, so you need the number itself, or the shop.

1. Search your email for the shop’s name, or for words like shipped, dispatched, on its way, tracking. Check spam and promotions folders.
2. Open your order history on the shop’s website or app. Most show the tracking link on the order page.
3. Marketplaces keep it on the order, even when a third-party seller ships it.
4. Still nothing? Ask the shop. They can resend it in a minute.

The recipe, the article, the page you closed

1. Just closed it? Safari: History › Recently Closed. Chrome-based browsers: ⇧⌘T.
2. Earlier? Press ⌘Y and search your history for a word likely to be in the page title: the dish, the site, the author. History doesn’t search the text of pages, so “cardamom” won’t work unless it was in the title.
3. On your phone? If you use the same browser on iPhone with sync turned on, its history is in the same place.

The promo code, the booking reference, the confirmation number

• Codes from emails — search for the shop or for code, promo, voucher.
• Booking references — search for the airline, hotel or booking, reservation, confirmation. Many travel sites also keep them in your account.
• Codes shown on a page that you never saved — this is the hard one. If you didn’t screenshot it, nothing on your Mac kept it.

The address, the phone number, the name

• Messages and Mail search the text of conversations; try the street name or a part of the number.
• Maps keeps your recent searches.
• A screenshot? Open it in Preview and select the text — macOS reads it for you (Live Text).

Why we keep losing these

Everything above works only if the thing was saved somewhere: an email, a history entry, a file. But much of what we read on a screen is never saved. We see it, we think “I’ll remember”, and we move on. That isn’t carelessness; it is how memory works. We remember that we saw something, rarely what it was exactly.

Next time: let your Mac remember

A screen memory closes that gap. It keeps a light, compressed memory of what was on your screen and reads its text, so a parcel number, a recipe title or a code you saw on Tuesday is one search away: type “UPS”, or “cardamom”, and land on the moment, the word highlighted. You can copy the number straight from the picture.

DejaVu does exactly that, on your Mac. It is designed to be safe to leave on all day:

• Nothing leaves your Mac. No account, no cloud. It never keeps audio or what you type.
• Your passwords are never kept. Password managers are never kept, nothing is kept while you type a password, and private windows and video calls are skipped.
• You stay in control. Pause in one click, forget the last 5 minutes in one click, and keep any app or site out for good.
• It opens with Touch ID. Your memory is encrypted on your Mac.

It is free with 3 days of memory — enough for “what was that number from yesterday?” — and Pro keeps your whole memory. Join the waitlist to try the beta.