Q: Help!! I accidentally deleted ALL my calendars! How do I restore them??
I finally upgraded my older laptop to Lion. Thus, I got iCloud on it. When I told it to sync calendars, it asked if I wanted to merge with iCloud. It was the only option if I wanted to sync. So, I clicked "merge". That was fine, but it duplicated ALL my calendars. So, I went in and deleted the duplicate calendars (located at my .me address), and kept all the "iCloud" calendars. When I deleted the duplicate, it deleted ALL the calendars. Now I have NOTHING! AGH! I've tried to restore from Time Machine, but I get a message that ical cannot be modified because it is required by Mac OS. PLEASE HELP!! I have to get my calendars back!!!!
Posted on Nov 16, 2011 2:24 PM
It sounds as if you are trying to restore the iCal application: that won't help you. The calendars are kept (assuming Lion is the same as Snow Leopard) in (user)/Library/Calendars and it is that you should try to restore. Note that the user LIbrary is hidden in Lion. To access it, in the Finder go to the ‘Go’ menu and hold down the Option (Alt) key; the Library folder will appear as a choice. Open it and use Time Machine on the Calendars folder.
Even if you can restore the calendars, the iCloud sync process will promptly remove them again, so there is a slightly complicated process which you need to follow exactly. It's detailed here:
http://www.wilmut.webspace.virginmedia.com/notes/timemachine.html
It's written for MobileMe but the process should also work with iCloud.
Posted on Nov 16, 2011 2:59 PM