iCal will not save my events, appointments...

Hello again Gordon.
Yes, I agree 100% with your post. It's behaving in exactly the same way as mine. Yes, I do have an iPhone (just upgraded to 3g) so were both in the same boat.
Out of interest, I've abandoned getting my iCal to work for now.
I partitioned my hard drive on the MacBook, and am using it dual booted with Leopard on one partition and Tiger on the other. I use Leopard for day-to-day working, and reboot to Tiger for iCal and to sync to the iPhone. It's a bit of a cop-out, I know, but at least now everything works as it should!
Bring on 10.5.5 - we live in hope!!!

I have been having the same problem- at first I thought it was a MobileMe sync problem because I noticed that changes to iCal wouldn't show up on my calendar on MobileMe, but yesterday I noticed that any changes to iCal would disappear after quitting and reopenning iCal. It appears to have been not working since 10.5.4 update. I am starting to consider radical solutions {restoring from backup doesn't work; resetting sync services doesn't either}. Delete calendars and import an recently exported backup?????

Hello Bruce.
Deleting calendars and importing an recently exported backup won't help, I'm afraid. That's one of the many things I have tried.
The only way that I've got iCal to work properly is to dual boot my MacBook with Tiger, and use the iCal from Tiger to sync with the iPhone. It's a bit of a fuss having to reboot to sync, but it's better than having iCal not working!
I wonder if Apple read these threads, because it MUST now be apparant that there is a problem with iCal. This number of experienced Mac owners can't ALL be doing something silly to make it malfunction....

Hi, fellow sufferers.
Have you tried creating (or using) a different account on your Mac? In the machine where I have the problem only my account is affected, the other users can save events without any problems. That would save the hassle of rebooting into Tiger.
Incidentally, on the affected account iCal will subscribe to a shared calendar and sync correctly with my iPhone. So I am getting by by managing my appointments on my MacBook then syncing from the affected account on my iMac.
Very weird. As I've said before hopefully this will be cured in the upcoming 10.5.5 which Macrumors has reported includes an update to iCal.

Hello Gordon.
Thanks for that.
Yes, that's another good way to fix this problem. I'm glad that it works for you.
I'm personally going to stick with re-booting, as I know it works for me. 🙂
I agree that this is a situation which shouldn't exist. This is the first time I've ever had to do a workaround on a Mac, and I've been using them since OS 8.6. Let's hope that 10.5.5 sorts iCal out!

Hello,
same problem with iCal here. After i quit iCal, all changes just vanish! I haven't been using iCal for the summer because of vacation but now when I was about to continue my work I realized that iCal does not save anything. I have tried to cure iCal with the intructions, which have have been discussed here. I have also re-installed iCal from the Leopard CD and ran the permissions correction from both the CD and HD. Still no help. I noticed that this issue does not appear when I log in as a guest. The issue does not seem to be dependant on whether the MobileMe sync is switched on or off. So I gues I'll just wait for the 10.5.5 update. I am not going to re-install OS X because according to the marketing, this is supposed to be a stable platform. 🙂

These kind of severe bugs just shouldn't be existing. If OS X is supposed to be adapted to enterprise use, the quality testing must improve at Apple, even though in general they are doing quite a good job. Infact a better job than many competitor.

Hello-
I have the same problem - iCal is totally unreliable for me. It's driving me mad, and losing enormously much time. I specially bought an iPod Touch as a PDA to use iCal for my professional appointments, and I find iCal totally unreliable. Often appointments I enter disappear, or change, and also random events appear in iCal which I did not enter. Some events duplicate: I enter an event and suddenly there are four or five events at the same or similar time.

I have done almost every solution I can think of: went to the Apple-Store for advice (they told me that the data base is corrupted and needs to be deleted, and I need to start fresh with an empty calender). I did this and iCal worked for a day or two and got corrupted again.
I reinstalled the system a couple of times, deleted the calendar data base. Stored and reinstalled the appointments calender - I have tried all the possibilities which various sources, Apple store, etc recommend.

Anybody has any idea what can be done? Does anyone use iCal for professional appointments? at least my copy/installation of iCal would be far to unreliable and time-wasting.

Gerhard

Hello Gerhard.
Yes, I use iCal for business appointments!
That's why I'm so concerned about this.
I'm dual-booting Leopard and Tiger at the moment to run iCal in 10.4
Apple really have to sort this out - is anyone in there watching the forum???

I was here investigating the mysteries of iCal, when I noticed that it started to work properly when i turned off the OS X Address book Birthday calendar prenumeration. Every time I mark the birthday calendar box in iCal's settings menu, iCal becomes totally unusable.

I have now succesfully recreated my iCal from a backup copy on an external disk so I have got back all my old calendars, which i threw away in the intention to clean things up. At least with this MacBook the scenario can be repeated: put a mark in the birthday checkbox in the settings menu of iCal -> iCal stops saving anything and if the checkbox is left empty -> iCal works perfect and saves data.

Note: the birthday calendar must be hidden from the settings menu in iCal, just unchecking this prenumeration i the margin of iCal won't be enough.

Hello SDJR,
I lost again several hours trying to get iCal to work.
I reinstalled the whole Mac system fresh. iCal seemed to work for a few hours,
but then it was totally messed up again as before.
Now I discovered a very strange new behavior: I deleted all the old calenders,
this funny p file (never discovered what that does) as they had told me in the Apple Store.
After a few hours mysteriously the old deleted calenders appeared again, I deleted them,
they came back like a YoYo. And all the messy behavior with lost appointments, spurious "ghost" appointments etc is back.

This iCal - at least on my computer - seems to keep the DNA about how to return to messy behavior, and also lots of corrupted old calenders in some secret cache. So even if I delete
all the calenders and files they told me to delete in the Apple Store to get a fresh clean virgin iCal start - then iCal will get these deleted files back from some secret hidden cache somewhere, which the Apple Store does not know about.

Very strange and extremely frustrating and time wasting. I run a consulting firm in Tokyo, and this is really costing me money...

I used to use Palm-Pilot in the past - there was never never any problem like that. Palm Pilot really worked very very well. The Palm Pilot calender software both on Palm and on Mac seem to have been debugged much much better than iCal. Maybe the Apple iCal people should hire some advisors from the Palm Pilot team and get their advice how to fix iCal.

Hi Finmac-

welcome to the Club of iCal victims. Switching off the b-day function is a great idea. Had not thought about it yet. You made me think that its best to switch off the time-zone function as well.
It would be a dream if that fixes iCal.
Maybe Apple has forgotten to debug the Birthday and time-zone functions of iCal? Lets hope.

Hi,

Try the iSync instructions on this page:
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1627

This fixes problems with the sync database overwriting new additions to iCal.

Best wishes

John M

My problem with iCal is not completely the same. When i make an appointment it stays in iCal but is won't be saved as an event in the calender --> event folder!!!
My time machine backups didn't have a lot of events either, so i think that's why everyone lost a lot of events since upgrading to leopard 10.5.5
Can anybody confirm this?

I got the same issue... I put events in iCal then quit iCal and reopen it they do not appear. I don't know how long this has been happening since I didn't think I needed to verify the events stayed. I really hope Apple is able to get this fixed quickly. I am using 10.5.5 and it hasn't been fixed as someone previously speculated.

Here's what works:

1) Choose File>Back up iCal... to back up your database

2) Delete the entire folder: user/Library/Application Support/iCal
3) Delete the entire folder: user/Library/Calendars
4) Delete the files: user/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iCal.alarmsCache.plist, com.apple.iCal.AlarmScheduler.plist, com.apple.iCal.helper.plist, and com.apple.iCal.plist
5) Delete user/Library/Preferences/iCalExternalSync.plist

6) Empty trash and reboot. If trash doesn't empty, reboot and empty trash again.

7) Open iCal and restore from your backed up database.

Disappearing events are probably the result of corrupted caches. I did this and it worked and I didn't have to reinstall system software or create new calendars. Of course, the disappearing events would then need to be recreated.