[Moviem]

My Calendars were hosted on MobileMe. Something changed today and all 6 years of dates and notes for each of those days are gone. All the Calendars on the left of iCal are gone... replaced by Home and unknown. All subsequent devices are now cleared as well.

Any ideas?

M

 

[pm-r]

I can't help and the article probably won't either but the warning may help others:

20 Feb 2011 1 pm eastern
HOLD OFF UPGRADING MOBILEME ICAL

Hold off upgrading MobileMe iCal – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report

Edit: It looks like the posts to that article may provide a solution and fix as it did for the author using a suggested posted method. Read them all before doing anything, including the corrected posts.

 

[mkolesa]

did you quit ical and relaunch? the same thing happened to me after the mobileme ical upgrade and that did the trick. you could also try a restart.

 

[pm-r]

Good point but I would have thought that any member or reader of this list would have learned and read by now to at least restart when things don't work as expected and at least do so before posting.

And a more thorough 'purging' fix method that often works is to shut down, wait 10+ seconds and then boot up into Safe boot mode (hold down the shift key when the startup chime sounds), select admin user account and login and run the Disk Utility permissions repair and verify disk routines and then just restart normally.

 

[broad]

there was a thread similar to this a few months ago. i argued pretty forcefully then (just as i will now) that having your data ANYWHERE where it exists only once is not good, and puts your data at risk. if it *only* exists on the me servers its just as at risk as if it *only* exists on your hard drive (ie no backup)

it takes all of about 10 seconds to go to ical/file/export/ical archive and put it in a folder somewhere on your computer. i realize this doesn't help now, but hopefully it will in the future.

apple's servers are no more infallible than your hard drive.

 

[SINC]

there was a thread similar to this a few months ago. i argued pretty forcefully then (just as i will now) that having your data ANYWHERE where it exists only once is not good, and puts your data at risk. if it *only* exists on the me servers its just as at risk as if it *only* exists on your hard drive (ie no backup)

it takes all of about 10 seconds to go to ical/file/export/ical archive and put it in a folder somewhere on your computer. i realize this doesn't help now, but hopefully it will in the future.

apple's servers are no more infallible than your hard drive.

Yep, sound advice indeed. Many years ago, in the days of 40 GB HDs, my HD was getting full due to lots of photos shot with my new digital camera. I uploaded all my photos to .Mac at the time and utilized the extra space on my HD for more pictures.

About three months later I got an email from Apple. It was to inform me they had "inadvertently" deleted my account and all my data was lost. Not to worry though they said, you get a free one year subscription to .Mac along with our apology. Just human error, not a server issue, but it surprised me that even Apple had no back up.

I've had quadruple back up ever since. (Original on my MBP, copy on my external clone / Time Machine drive, my Mini's external drive and on DVDs off site.

 

[Ace McDuck]

disappearing iCal data...

So I didn't hold off, but thought that backing up my iCal would give me a safety net. Well, I lost all calendar info, then went to my backup. I get "restore failed". A very informative message, and I still don't have my calendar info back.

Note: I am in the process of hopefully recovering my calendar. For anyone in a similar state - running 10.5.8 with iCal empty but MobileMe calendars okay - the Apple support document is Article HT4330, and the relevant piece is copied below. The nut of it is that you must set up your MobileMe calendar as a CalDAV account to pull the information down from the cloud, as it were.

If you need to sync a computer with Mac OS X Leopard with the new MobileMe Calendar, follow these steps:

Important: Do not follow these steps until you have successfully joined the new MobileMe Calendar. For more information about joining the new MobileMe Calendar, see this article.

Open iCal Preferences.
Click Accounts.
Click the plus button at the bottom of the page.
For both Description and Username, enter your full MobileMe email address, including @me.com or @mac.com. If you don't include @me.com or @mac.com, the setup will not be successful.
Enter your MobileMe password.
Click the disclosure triangle next to Server Options.
For Account URL, enter the following without quotes: "https://cal.me.com". Be sure to include the full URL, including the "https://". Note that you do not need to include a closing "/" at the end of the url.
Click Add.
Now that your MobileMe account is set up, iCal will begin downloading the data from the new MobileMe Calendar servers.