Snow Leopard: calendar contents lost

Did you try the Google calendars solution? (Import the old ICS files into Google calendar, then export those into your new system.) Worked like a charm for me. Going into the file and deleting ""X-WR-OCCTRIGGER" seems like a lot of work when Google will just do it for you... :P

Of course you may not have a Google account, but it's totally worth it for other reasons besides this (sharing Google spreadsheets, etc.).

BTW, now I backup with both Backup AND Time Machine... just in case. :P They both seem to have their pros and cons... of course in this case, it probably wouldn't have mattered since the problem doesn't seem to be with the actual backup, but rather an incompatibility between the old iCal files and the new ones...

"Hope someone at the company is looking into this."

Hahahahahahahahahahaha... Good one!!

I had started a new post on this, but now see it's a standard bug. More than two months since it was first reported and still no response from Apple: shame! I have reverted to Leopard and feel the money I spent on Snow Leopard has been wasted. My calendars are too important to me to have an iCal that's not working correctly and I am not happy to try and fudge it with complex work-rounds.

"This Question is Answered" Well, not really. It depends what resources you have to hand.
I have had another go at upgrading to Snow Leopard and this is what I did this time:
Exported all my calendars to Google Calendars, just to be safe.
Sync'd all my calendars to both my iPod Touch and my Nokia 95.
Installed Snow Leopard
Opened iCal to find the only visible calendar is Birthdays (transferred from Address Book). All other calendars listed but without events.
Re-sync'd iPod Touch. The warning came up about more than 25% of the events being different. Took a chance and lo! all events now visible. To Do's too.

Tried most solutions. Didn't work.
Lost my events in 2 calendars after upgrading from Tiger to SL. Although my case is not nearly as horible as what I just read (past events not beeing so important and upcomings can be rewritten), I still wish I'd stayed w/ Tiger.

Ray

just upgraded from mac mini 10.4 to macbook pro 10.6 and lost data in 4 of 12 calendars only.

flyleaf’s suggestion to delete lines starting with “ X-WR-OCCTRIGGER” worked beeeeeautifically for me. this can be done quickly by opening the iCal file in TextEdit and copy-pasting into MS word (or similar) and replacing the strings (in order) as follows. select “apply to all open docs” to do this to multiple calendars at once.

1) "^p^p" with "^p"
2) "^p^l" with "^l"
3) "Event reminder^lX-WR-OCCTRIGGER" with "Event reminder^tX-WR-OCCTRIGGER"

then select text, under table menu, convert text to table (separate text at tabs), then delete the right column (check the entire thing first!). convert table to text and copy-paste back into the text edit file.

if the file is big you may have to do the table conversion in steps, i encountered a limit of 4000 rows.

alternatively, replace step 3 described above with the following, then there are probably clumps of very few blocks of OCCTRIGGER, which can be found and deleted (3-click paragraph) quickly and easily.

3) "Event reminder^lX-WR-OCCTRIGGER" with "Event reminder^pX-WR-OCCTRIGGER"

--

actually i wasn’t able to copy-paste back into textedit or BBEdit, and in the end did a find for the start of the string and deleted the clumps manually. in 8000 lines of code in one calendar i only had only 8 clumps.

This is my first post after many years of coming here for info and help. Just wanted to say thanks so much for the detective work and instructions. I had the same problem; upgraded from 10.4.11 and had my main calendar acting like an empty shell. Not acceptable! Besides the perfectly legitimate normal practical reasons for not wanting to lose my old calendar data, I also have no memory and need to go back through my calendar occasionally to remember who I am. +(Oh yeah, I remember that... )+

I basically followed your suggestions except I used TextWrangler and instead of importing after deleting the "X-WR-OCCTRIGGER" files I simply right-click opened the ics into iCal where it gave me the option window to select a calendar to put the "new events" into. It only took about 10 minutes and I got back events going back to the late 90's!

Wish I hadn't spent almost 2 hours trying other things like deleting and replacing all the calendars, prefs, wracking brain, etc...

Thanks again,
'zilicano

I found this thread while looking for a way to migrate the Tiger iCal data to Snow Leopard manually.
I did not want to use Migration Assistant given the amount of old apps and prefs that I did not want to move.
At first I was unable to find a way to move the data directly. However, I finally determined that by moving the data files from the location that they held in Tiger to the same location (Which is not where Snow Leopard creates them) in Snow Leopard and then run iCal, the calendar files are updated.
This includes moving the iCal folder that exists (in Tiger) in ~/Library/Application Support and the iCal plist file inside the ~/Library/Preferences folder. Put these folders into the same locations in Snow Leopard.
Lastly, delete anything that exists in ~/Library/Calendars on the new system before running iCal.
Run iCal and iCal will update the calendar files and create what it needs in the ~/Library/Calendars folder. Snow Leopard seems to create its calendar files directly in ~/Library/Calendars.
After the calendar updates you may delete the iCal folder from ~/Library/Application Support.
You should be done.
I Did end up with a few duplicate calendars titled "Corestorage". I was able to delete these.
This may have happened because of my earlier toying around so if you follow my earlier steps before doing anything else I would suspect you will not see these calendars. If you do, just remove them.
I'd be interested in hearing if anyone else has success with this.

-Scott

Well having called Apple twice, poured over this discussion trying everything suggested the only thing that finally worked was getting rid of the "X-WR-OCCTRIGGER" text on the iCal ICS file that I was trying to import from Tiger to Snow Leopard. At least I found a short-cut in the process:

Open the ICS file with TextEdit, do a command-Find "OCCTRIGGER" (I had only 2) and delete the whole "X-WR-OCCTRIGGER" line. Save file and import (finally!) into iCal.