Problem with downgrade of mobileme : unable to restore calendars

Question

Level 1

8 points

Problem with downgrade of mobileme : unable to restore calendars

I decided to downgrade from the new MobileMe calendar as I used to group all my calendars to publish them jointly for colleagues using outlook on PCs and the grouping feature is not available in the new version (it is difficult for them if they have to subscribe to the 8 calendars I use to sort the different types activities).

I followed the instructions in order to downgrade and keep my data.
I did the backup of all my calendars, but after the downgrade i have the following problem:
When I do the restore of the calendars that were backed up, the restore works fine and I see all my calendars reappear, but they reappear as part of MobileMe and after a few minutes are wiped out as MobileMe seems to think that the cloud version (empty after the downgrade) is more recent...
Is there any way to force ical to restore my calendars locally rather than on MobileMe?

If anyone has an idea of how to restore the data of my calendars please help, with all my information unavailable I have a very hard time functioning!

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.4), iWork'08

Posted on Oct 4, 2010 6:10 AM

Reply

Answer 1

MadisonP

Level 5

4,832 points

Oct 5, 2010 10:29 AM in response to phil.c

Greetings,

Reset your sync services: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1627

Once complete restore iCal from your backup file.

Hope that helps.

Reply

Answer 2

phil.c Author

Level 1

8 points

Oct 5, 2010 12:48 PM in response to MadisonP

Thank you very much for the suggestion, unfortunately it did not help.
I did the reset, but I still get exactly the same behavior. Namely, when in Ical I do "Import..." and choose to restore, my calendars appear under my me.com address (where they were before the downgrade from the beta MobileMe calendar), and they do not appear under the ON MY MAC where they used to be before the upgrade to the MobileMe beta.
Since the appear in the me.com section the restored calendars are wiped out after a few seconds and replaced by empty Home and Work calendars...

I tried looking around in the .icbu file and found inside the package all the individual .ics files of my appointments... The only problem is that there are several thousands of them (all my events since 1999 more or less), it is relatively easy to restore any individual event by double clicking on it but given the number this is not feasible... (and they are not ranked in any particular order that would make it easy to restore only the latest events).
So I wonder if there is a command line to restore all .ics files that are in a folder in a given calendar?

Thank you very much for any help!
I am getting quite desperate without easy access to my agenda!

Reply

Answer 3

MadisonP

Level 5

4,832 points

Oct 5, 2010 1:03 PM in response to phil.c

Hm. Odd. That would suggest you made the backup file AFTER you upgraded. In which case it makes sense it is restoring the calendars in that fashion as a backup file just gives you exactly what you had when you made it.

Restore your calendar and then click on each calendar on the left and go to File > Export > Export.
This will make a local .ics file for each calendar.
You can then re-import these and they will show up as local calendars.

Reply

Answer 4

phil.c Author

Level 1

8 points

Oct 5, 2010 1:28 PM in response to MadisonP

THANKS!

This did the trick!
Of course my backup was made after the upgrade, actually just before the downgrade as part of the instructions on the MobileMe downgrade page.
In case it can help anyone with a similar problem, now I understand what happened: The thing is I did a small mistake in the backup before the downgrade, I chose File>Export>Ical Archive rather than File>Export>Export
And then when I did the import from the Ical Archive .icbu file it restores the entire Ical with all calendars where they used to be...
After your message, I unplugged my computer from the internet, did the restore from the icbu file, then did the export .ics files for each calendar. Connect to the internet again so that the calendars would be wiped out again. And then imported each calendar from the .ics files into new calendars and now, low and behold, I am back to the old Sync (i.e. without the new MobileMe beta) and got all my data back (including the events added during the MobileMe beta).

Once again I don't know how to thank you enough!

Reply

Answer 5

Lynn TMI

Level 1

0 points

Oct 22, 2010 2:07 PM in response to phil.c

I am having the same problem with MobileMe calendars. Can you tell me how you did the downgrade back to iCal?

Reply

Answer 6

Jan 7, 2011 7:24 AM in response to phil.c

Wow this has been the solution! Spend a day trying to restore the icbu file and constantly it got overwritten by mobile me. After your process I could restore all my calendars.

Now the cloud has become master of all my computers, why does the option to send all data from computer to MM still exist??? This is confusing!

Again thanks!

Reply