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IPhone Calendar Changes not Syncing with ICal

Additions and changes to my iPhone calendar are not synced with ICal on my Mac. Syncing the other direction (adding or changing appointments on my Mac) works, but nothing I change or add on my iPhone appears on my Mac (the same seems to be true of contacts and notes). I have the same problem with an iPod touch.

Has anyone else experienced (and fixed) a similar problem? As it ism the iPhone-Mac sync only works in one direction!

MacBook Pro  15.4" ● 2.33GHz ● 3 GB ● 160 GB   |, Mac OS X (10.5.1)

Posted on Jan 22, 2008 12:18 PM

Reply
43 replies

Jun 12, 2018 5:34 PM in response to Roy Levien

Hi Roy,

I've tried everything (delete all the Calendars files, etc).
And nothing works !

In iTunes, when I choose "Replace informtion on this iPhone" it does'nt work either.

Any idea ?
Thanks for your help.

Jan 22, 2008 1:40 PM in response to Roy Levien

If you create a new user account and try syncing just the calendar events, does it sync from the iphone to the computer.

To test this open system preferences and go to accounts.
Create a new account, call it test or something.
Log into the new account.
Open ical ant put in at least one event. If you do not put at least one event into ical, itunes does not know to merge the data and could erase the events on the iphone.
Once the test event is in ical, open itunes and go through the initial setup.
Then connect the iphone and sync just the calendar events.

Hope this helps.

Jan 24, 2008 8:27 AM in response to Roy Levien

Among the list of calendars that can be synced, ITunes lists a calendar that is not in iCal; deleting it from iCal does not solve the sync problem:

Appointments changed on the iPhone seem to become completely decoupled from those in iCal. Once an appointment is changed on the iPhone, there seems to be no way to get it to respond to changes made in iCal. If it is changed in both places, the conflict is not always detected.

Deleting an appointment from the iPhone, deletes it there permanently, even if it is still in iCal. Even changing it in iCal fails to trigger its restoration on the iPhone. Only by deleting the sync history in iSync is the appointment restored on the iPhone (but it takes a few tries before it becomes responsive to changes made in iCal).

Choosing to "replace" the calendar on the iPhone with the one on my Mac, does not seem to work: an appointment changed on the iPhone remains changed, even if it was left alone on the Mac.

Contacts appear to sync. Notes don't sync at all (are the supposed to?)

Jan 24, 2008 8:43 AM in response to Roy Levien

I had been having the problem of entries in both the calendar and address book that were made on my Razr not being uploaded when synced.

After getting my iPhone the problem still existed.

There is another thread on this forum you can search for that has a procedure that fixes the problem. Unfortunately it requires deleting your calendar entries and starting iCaI fresh.

What I did was make sure my iPhone was correct for calendar and address book entries. After I deleted everything from iCal I used the iPhone to rebuild my calendar entries. This reset now allows for 2way communication between my iMac and phone. It is working the way it is supposed to.

I suggest you look for the thread that contains the procedure. Perhaps searching for "unregister" and "sync" will find it as part of the procedure is to unregister computers from .Mac. I wish I could provide more info but...

I think I found the answer in the Leopard discussions, not the phone.

Message was edited by: Jerryb

Jan 24, 2008 3:13 PM in response to Jerryb

OK, here's what I did that worked:

1. I turned off .Mac Sync. (I never trusted this and think it's probably the cause of this and many other problems. It seems to come back on on its own though.)
2. Backed up my entire calendar. File>Back up iCal. (In case something went wrong.)
3. Exported each of my calendars as file(s) using File>Export.
4. Deleted all of my calendars from iCal. (Making note of any URLs to shared calendars.)
5. Quit iCal and deleted the entire ~/Library/Calendars folder and all files in ~/Library/Calendars that had "ical" in their names.
4. Launched iCal and reimported all the the calendars I just exported.
5. Used iTunes to sync with my iPhone checking "Calendar" under INFO Tab>Replace information on this iPhone.

I tried several less invasive approaches (mostly partial versions of the above) but none were sufficient. I had to do the whole thing to get it to work (at least for now).

Jan 25, 2008 4:01 PM in response to Roy Levien

I'm having the same infuriating problem: events entered into phone do not show up on desktop calendar. I have tried everything including restoring the phone, checking different combinations of mailboxes, etc., wasting half a workday in the process. I think this is a BUG that Apple needs to FIX.

But I will try one more time; and in the meantime add an asterisk next to appointments made on my phone so I remember to re-enter them on the desktop calendar manually. Not very sexy.

Jan 26, 2008 2:11 PM in response to Roy Levien

I have not had this problem; but I have read it many times on this forum. Seems to me it only happens in Leopard? (My laptop is tiger 10.4.11)

The process described by Roy Levien seems to be the one process that really works (just my observation from reading the same issue several times).

Here is a suggestion for all Leopard users who have encountered this problem. Report it to Apple at http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html If enough Leopard users report the same issue with the same version of Leopard, Apple will (we can hope) notice it as a bug and issue a fix as a software update.

Happy 'putin

Jan 26, 2008 2:29 PM in response to Roy Levien

One (perhaps not consequential) error in my instructions above :

{quote:title=Original:}5. Quit iCal and deleted the entire ~/Library/Calendars folder and all files in ~/Library/Calendars that had "ical" in their names.{quote}
{quote:title=Corrected:}5. Quit iCal and deleted the entire ~/Library/Calendars folder and all files in ~/Library/ Preferences that had "ical" in their names.{quote}

Jan 28, 2008 9:00 AM in response to babykong

Just a warning to babykong: I used the "Roy Levien" solution several weeks ago, and it fixed the problem. Happily went about entering appointments, etc. in the iphone, trusting they would sync back to the MacPro. Everything worked fine until some point when they stopped syncing back again.

I also find this amazingly infuriating. I know that I've lost some appointments when I would make a conflicting entry on the macbook. I've probably missed some appointments.

So... until this bug is fixed, and please make it soon, Apple, I write the event in that Notes iphone program, AND to make sure, I email it to myself to remind me to enter it in the calendar. And if anyone has seen a PERMANENT solution in these discussions or elsewhere, I'd really appreciate hearing about it.

Jan 28, 2008 6:18 PM in response to Roy Levien

I had the same problem, and then all my calendars stopped syncing either way. They picked a beautiful time to do it, too... right as I was leaving on a business/pleasure vacation where I was making on the fly appointments. grumble

However, I fixed it tonight. Here is what I did.

1. Back up (export) all your iCal calendars. (not just good practice, you'll need them later) Make sure iCal is closed.
2. under ~/Library/Application Support/iCal delete everything.
3. under ~/Library/Calendars delete everything
4. Sync your phone.

At this point you should have your phone overwriting everything in iCal. If your problem is ONLY syncing from phone to iCal you should be good to go, if you can't sync either way, you'll need to:

5. Drag all your backed up calendars back to iCal. In theory they will sort themselves out, but you might have some duplicates between stuff you've created on your phone and in iCal.

I don't know if this will keep the problem from occurring again, but at the very least, I was able to test out my ability to create events on either side, and it works.

I kept hoping that the last iPhone update would solve this for me, alas!

IPhone Calendar Changes not Syncing with ICal

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