I've been playing around with the windows clipboard. I noticed that you can only view the clipboard if you supply a format. I've seen programs that can dump the raw contents of the clipboard. Look at http://www.autohotkey.com/docs/misc/Clipboard.htm#ClipboardAll for an example of what I mean.

Is there a way to do something similar, what I want to do is be able to back up the clipboard, manipulate it, then restore it when my program is done.

I'm looking for a non-.net solution if that's actually a thing