[chasg]

Hi All,

I need to restore my iCal calendars from my Time Machine archive (I need to go back a week or so). Can anyone point me to the right way to do so? Here's the short version: Apple erased all of my iCal data on MobileMe, which then erased it all on all of my machines.

I am a long-time MobileMe user (from back when .Mac was a free service), and I have all of my devices sync'ed up. Recently, I got an email from Apple saying that they were updating the calendars in MobileMe, and that I needed to do this upgrade. I logged in to the online MobileMe and yep, there was a "upgrade your calendars" button. So, I did so (yes, some will see a flaw in my approach at this point, lesson learned).

Later that day, I went to check my appointments on my iPhone, to find that there were none (but I knew that there should have been). A quick flip through my calendars revealed that they were all empty. A quick check with my laptop showed that all 10 years of iCal data were gone (this is more of a disaster than some might think: I take detailed notes during meetings, and all these notes go into the notes section of that iCal appointment). MobileMe had erased all of my calendars, and then, of course, propagated all of these "changes" throughout all of my sync'ed iCal calendars (iPhone, laptop, desktop, family iMac).

This was not good at all.

I decided to have a chat with an Apple tech (text chat) who determined he couldn't help me, so he escalated it to a senior technician. He was helpful at first, but then I didn't hear anything for a week (and other bad MobileMe stuff happened, but this thread is just about iCal, for the moment). Got an email back tonight with an iCal archive that they had recovered from their own backups (I'm assuming). It's incomplete, and now I need to see if my own Time Machine backups can help (yes, I realise that this should have been my first point of call, but my original chat was really just to get some info on what happened, and it escalated from there).

Here is my problem with trying to restore with Time Machine:

In /Library/Application Support/iCal/Sources/ are a bunch of .ics files (7 of them in various folders with what looks like hex names) which a little Googling has indicated is where iCal stores all of its data. All have a creation and modification date of July 15, 2008 (I'm assuming it's when I did something significant with iCal). I can't use any of these with Time Machine (if the modification date is so long ago, then Time Machine isn't going to see any differences).

What can I do to get all of my data back? (Apple is now a dead end).

One last comment: Apple has told me that they are not responsible for the loss of my data. I'm pretty annoyed with that, MobileMe fine print notwithstanding. I feel that they owe me some redress, am I right in thinking so?

Thanks in advance for any advice,

Chas

[ibook_steve]

According to this discussion:

Apple - Support - Discussions - Calling all iCal Experts.... ...

the database is at User/Library/Calendars now, assuming you are using Leopard or Snow Leopard. I'm not sure how Apple tech support would not know that.

Steve

[chasg]

@£!$^@!! so that's where they are, thanks very much for the pointer.

In the Apple Tech's defense, we never actually talked about recovering from Time Machine, they went straight to their own backups.

In User/Library/Calendars/ there is a _lot_ of stuff. Any idea what I should dial back with Time Machine to recover my calendars to a pre-disaster state?

Thanks very much for the help, I really do appreciate it.

Cheers!

Chas

[ibook_steve]

I'd just be safe and bring it all back. If you have nothing right now, it can't hurt.

Steve

[chasg]

Hi Steve,

Thanks again for the advice.

I agree: I'm going to bring it all back, but my question really is: do I roll back User/Library/Calendars/ to do it, or is there other data elsewhere that I need to roll back as well?

Cheers!

Chas