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My iCal import is taking forever / broken / not working??

I did an iCal export on my iMac in "Export" format, moved it to an older computer and am trying to import the iCal data, but it's taking forever. I mean, like it's run overnight and it still hasn't finished the calendar event import. That can't be right, it shouldn't be this slow! Is iCal broken? How the heck do I fix things?

Dave's Answer:

Man, can I feel your pain with this one. I spent a frustrating day not long ago with this very same problem, and even went into the Apple Store to show a "Genius" what was going on. Their solution didn't work and even after they tweaked and fiddled things (my main problem was with Mobile Me being out of sync) I still had the never-ending iCal Import problem.

Fortunately I tried a ton of different things and finally figured out how to fix it. So you're in luck.

What I believe is happening when you see "Restoring from backup file..." in iCal for hours and hours is that there's something corrupt in its cache files that's causing the problem. The solution is to just have it recreate all of its storage files and database. Here's how I did that.

First off, here's the window I bet you're seeing:

ical restoring from backup file

The clue for me was on the left side: there are no calendars listed, but there should be the default iCal calendars of "Home", "Work" and "Birthdays".

To fix it, quit iCal, then open up the Finder, and move to your "Library" directory. Within it you'll see lots of system and app folders:

ical calendar rename library folder

What you want to do is rename the folder "Calendars" to something else. I used "Calendars.old":

ical calendar rename library folder 2

Now when I started up iCal there were no events, but the calendars on the left side were present, as I expected:

ical no calendar data correct

This time when I did File --> Import and pulled in the 32MB iCal backup file, it imported all of the events, and even linked to the public FIFA World Cup calendar, all in about 90 seconds and all was good in the world again:

ical calendar data restored

If it all looks good for you, I suggest you go back to the Library folder and delete the renamed folder to save disk space. Or, wait a few days and make sure all is well first. Worst case, you can delete the new "Calendars" file and rename the old one "Calendars" so that iCal sees it. But I'm betting this'll fix your import problem...




Categorized: Mac OS X Help   (Article 9410, Written by )
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Comments

Dave,
are you being paid by apple to advertise their products?

Posted by: Enigma at April 30, 2010 9:31 PM

Enigma, nope, no such luck. I'm just a fan, have lots of Apple hardware and software, and put in lots of time helping other people avoid the problems, challenges and hiccups I encounter.

Posted by: Dave Taylor at April 30, 2010 11:44 PM

Hi Dave,

I'm going through the same problems. Your fix didn't work for me as whenever I renamed (or even deleted) the Calendars folder, a new one would automatically pop back up in the Libraries folder! No matter what I did, iCal would return it self to its previous state. I tried deleting everything in iCal and re-imported but it would be the same. Any idea?

Posted by: Allan at July 7, 2010 3:17 PM

Dude,

I have no idea who you are, I found your site trying to figure out how to fix what the Genius Bar guy had me do wrong. This solution is not for me, but I found out what to do with all of the "event" files I recovered from Time Machine. I had initially done a select all and added them ONE AT A TIME into the home calendar. Cannot tell you here what she had to say about her missing calendars...

I appreciate your wisdom mainly because it leaves the so-called genius people in the dust.

Weird

Posted by: Weird at October 15, 2010 3:32 PM

Sweet.
Started off in new calender - removed everything from user/Library/Calendar

restored all files from old (time machine) Calendar directory.
Restarted Ical, BINGO! it was all back in order - Thanks mate!

Posted by: Ron at November 13, 2010 4:21 AM

THANK YOU so so so so much. I've been looking for the solution to this forever, and it was causing my corrupted ical to keep overwriting my iphone/ipod touch calendars. This worked perfectly.

Posted by: David at November 17, 2010 10:38 AM

This helped me and I am an apple genius! I found that after I ran "iCal Dupe Deleter" a great app that solved a customer's huge slow ical problem. it was getting stuck on "ical restoring from backup file" for over 15 minutes. So i followed the above instructions and double clicked on the "fixed" ical backup file that the dupe deleter app creates, ical opened it and restored the "fixed" calendar in about 90 seconds! yay!

Posted by: Chris at May 31, 2011 10:03 PM

While your solution didn't work for me it lead me to something that did. I simply copied the /Users/[username]/Library/Calendars from my old computer to my new computer. For people who like the terminal this would be:

rm -r /Users/[username]/Library/Calendars
cp -r [location of backup] /Users/[username]/Library/Calendars

Replace the text in square brackets with the info on your computer. Note that there ISN'T a forward slash after "Calendars". For me this would be: [username] == marlen and
[location of backup] == /Volumes/Mac OS/Users/marlen/Library/Calendars

Backup done using Carbon Copy Cloner (which is very nice and free).

Posted by: Marlen at December 12, 2011 10:15 AM

I have something to say, now that you mention it, but ...
Starbucks coffee cup I do have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but first I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a cup of coffee!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!











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