After the latest software update to Mac OS X (10.6.3), I get duplicate items for everything in iCal (birthdays, holidays, events, etc). Anyone else having this problem and how do I delete all of the duplicates?
Find the "Calendar Cache" file in the Macintosh HD/Users/yourusername/Library/Calendars Folder. Drag the Calendar Cache file, or any other "Cache" files which may be in the Calendars Folder to the Desktop. Then log out/in or restart and check iCal for normal behavior.
I just check iCal and my calendar is all messed up. For each event I have listed, now the same event is post 8 times. This latest update 10.6.3 has really messed me up.
It turns out that all of the individual calendars in the side bar got duplicated. I removed the duplicates and also cleared my iCal cache file and that seems to have corrected the problem. Must be an iCal conversion problem with the OS 10.6.3. updater.
Note: I'm having some problems with SOHO Organizer not displaying some of my iCal calendars and have opened a ticket with Chronos to address that problem with their software.
Not only did my iCal become messed up on my MacBook Pro, but now after checking my iPhone iCal that also is now messed up with duplicate items. Their must be a real problem with this update to 10.6.3 when it comes to iCal. What a MAJOR problem this update has caused me.
I have the same problem with the update 10.6.3. The situation is made worse that the duplicate calendars do not contain exactly the same events, so I cannot delete any of these two. Putting the cache on the desktop did not help. Any hint on what to do?
Days like this really make me question whether the Mac is indeed superior to Windows.
I've spent the last 4 hours recovering my calendars from this sync catastrophe. I keep about a dozen calendars in iCal (some are my own, others are subscriptions, a couple are CalDAV two-way links with Google Calendar). All of the calendars were replicated multiple times in iCal and on MobileMe - I had in excess of 150 items in my calendars list.
Some comments on how I've restored things so that hopefully others will not waste as much time as I have.
* First, shut off MobileMe sync. I don't plan on ever synchronizing my calendars through Apple services again. After previous troubles culminating in the current disaster, I don't believe this product is salvageable.
* Might be wise to disconnect from the Internet entirely while conducting surgery on your calendars. Several times, iCal somehow reconstructed files that I had explicitly deleted.
* Quit out of iCal before doing anything.
iCal files are in ~/Library/Calendars.
Delete the cache file in ~/Library/Calendars/Calendar Cache; also ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.iCal.
You need to use the command line for this.
Make a backup copy of your Calendars folder before following any of these instructions.
Each calendar is stored in a subfolder under ~/Library/Calendars. These folders are named with unique identifiers, like "F16776B1-14B9-428C-B6C9-4D240D894B3B.calendar". CalDAV subscriptions end with .caldav.
In each calendar folder there is an Info.plist file. Look at one of these files, towards the bottom you'll see: will include:
<key>Title</key>
<string>[CALENDAR TITLE HERE]</string>
Since we have replicated calendars, there will be many folders for calendars with the same title. So, given a calendar that you want to recover...
$ cd ~/Library/Calendars
$ CALS=`grep "CALENDAR TITLE" *.calendar/Info.plist|sed 's/\/.*//'|sort|uniq`
$ for x in $CALS; do echo $x; ls -l $x/Events | wc; done
You'll get a list of calendar folders with the number of events in each calendar.
One of these folders is the one you want to keep. Probably the one that has the most events. If there are several with the same number of events, they are probably all identical copies, so just pick one.
DELETE all the other folders except the one you want to keep.
Repeat the process for every other unique calendar.
When you're done, the number of .calendar folders in ~/Library/Calendars should be reasonable (in my case).
Check again that there are no cache files left in the ~/Library/Calendars folder.
Your calendars should now be repaired. Make another backup copy of the entire Calendars folder - because iCal has a tendency to "fix" things of its own accord, so the pollution could magically reappear later.
Start iCal. Things should be back to normal.
Watch out for mysterious processes called iCalExternalSync and Mingler consuming lots of CPU. I suspect that these are responsible for some of the calendar destruction insanity but I haven't caught them red-handed yet.
The following worked for me on two different computers (MacBook Pro and iMac). I took the cache file out of the users/calendars. I restarted iCal and the computer. I made sure that the duplicate calendars were exact copies of each other (even if at the beginning, they are different, they will eventually be identical after a while, or after restarting the computer). After making sure of this, I selected the duplicate calendars one by one and deleted them using the 'Delete' command from the Edit menu. That's all.
I've seen this problem here too, but with a different twist.
1) I have duplicated events, but not duplicated calendars. For example, in one of my local calendars, my RECURRING events all seem to appear twice at the scheduled time on the scheduled days. None of my one-off (ie. non-recurring) events seem to be duplicated. Moreover, it seems like only those events with a weekly recurrence are duplicated. I have some monthly events which are in the same calendar as weekly events, and although the weekly events are duplicated, the monthlies are not.
2) Quitting iCal, deleting the two caches (~/Library/Calendars/Calendar Cache and ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.iCal) and restarting iCal makes the duplicate events go away...but only for a little while.
3) The duplicated events come back at some later time (possibly after shutting down and restarting iCal again, or waiting some period of time--I didn't test too carefully here).
Since I (mostly) don't generally have duplicated CALENDARS, the tricks that other people suggested to clear them out will not work for me.
One interesting note is that I do have ONE duplicated calendar: my birthday subscription feed from Address Book. I had one feed before this 10.6.3 upgrade mess started, but now I somehow have three.
An even more interesting note is the names of those three feeds are:
- Birthdays
- Cumpleaños ("birthdays" in Spanish)
- Birthdays
My OS X install language is English, but my user account language is Spanish. I wonder if something in Apple's localization-specific processing could cause it to bork the iCal part of the upgrade. Is anyone else here in a similar language situation?
What seems to be happening is that where before the Calendar on a device was synced with mobileme, now the device can have calendars of its own, plus calendars from mobileme, plus calendars from somewhere else. So if you look at "Calendars" in iCal, you see them hierarchically: On mobile me, and a list; on my iphone, and a list, on my mac, and a list. Unfortunately, the calendars are all likely to be the same, so you end up with duplicates of every item.
I have my Mac and iPhone synced with MobileMe. At first I had checked to sync calendars on my mac with the iphone in iTunes. This created a new set of calendars on my iphone, duplicating the ones from mobileme. So I shut off calendar sync in itunes, which made the "on my mac" calendars disappear from the iphone. But now I have "on my iPhone" calendars on the iphone. I only want the mobileme ones. Seems to be no way to get rid of the extra calendars on the iphone.
I do have a different flavor. My calendars and iCall work fine. Every time I change an entry in iCal like moving it from 09:00 to 11:00 this one is not synced, I mean updated on the iPhone after the next sync, it exists two times. One at 09:00 and one at 11:00 including different content in case I not only changed the time. iPhone created entries do not appear in my iCal after sync. What a mess.
Deleting cache files did not help. Restart etc. all the procedures did not help. Overwriting the calendar with sync duplicated everything.
Seeing the same thing, but no not a similar language situation... English - English on my setup...
My Calendar is a mess, all my cal items in CalDav set up as say, second Monday of the month, are all showing up weekly. I have duplicates all over the place.
I also had duplicates on a local calendar.. deleted the duplicate in iCal... came back in and both the original and duplicate items were all gone... darn!
This is happening to me as well. Everything in my "birthday" category is now a duplicate. If I try to select and remove the item, iCal tell me "You can’t add or change events in the Birthdays calendar." and offers to open the address book. The only way I've found to fix this is to delete the birthday field and then re-add it. Total PITA! Fix this Apple!
I'm experiencing the exact same thing after 10.6.3. update.
8 times every new entry on my iPhone.
No double calenders.
I'll try to see if the cache deletion is the solution...
