What's the difference between iCal Export and Archive?

Backup, as the name implies, is a backup. With export on the other hand you can select an individual calendar or events and put them on your disk as an ics file, which is then readable by other calendar software.

Austin, your response doesn't fully satisfy the question. First, while you're right that "backup" would imply that it's a backup, the word "backup" doesn't actually appear in the menu options. Some time has gone by from the original post and the original product names, but the concept of two choices still remains. They now are given as "Export…" and "Calendar Archive…" (previously it was "Export…" and "iCal Archive…").

According to other sources, "Export…" is used to export a single file, to later import to another calendar program or perhaps another computer.

"Calendar Archive…", on the other hand, is supposedly used to export ALL your calendars, and subsequently to import to a new Calendar on a different Mac (or, of course, to reload the current one). It seems to me that someone wanting to take their whole calendar environment off their office computer and get it onto a laptop or a home computer would want to use Calendar Archive rather than Export.

@Keith thanks for the great description. I am looking at this just now since I am switching over from using Google Calendar as my backend to a full iCloud solution for OSX and iOS now and I wanted to make sure I have a way to restore from a backup file all my iCloud calendar info incase I accidentally deleted an iCloud calendar, which I have found to be incredible easy to do on iOS devices.

Would you recommend this workflow to handle that?

On OS X in Calendar app File -> Export -> Calendar Archive on a monthly basis, and then if needed just grab the latest backup .icbu file and File -> Import to restore any lost event data.

Thanks for peoples' comments here.

Much time has passed since the question was asked, sorry about that. In case it's still unresolved, or if others have the same issue, here is my answer: Yes. 🙂

It's just always useful to have a couple of different types of backups available, and doing a periodic Calendar Archive is not a bad idea. The good thing about these archives is that they back up all of your calendars whether stored locally (on the internal storage device) or on an external account (e.g. iCloud).

And just to reiterate or clarify my earlier answer, a Calendar Export (File/Export/Export...), on the other hand, is for one calendar at a time, and it exports the events within the calendar, for subsequent import wherever you want them. It's an ics file, whose events can be imported to another Mac Calendar, or Google or Outlook calendar.

Lastly, I'm a big believer in text editors. You can do these Calendar exports and, if you're not sure what you just did, or that you got it right, you can open up your ics or icbu file in the text editor and see the data contained there. Just do a literal text search (say, the title of an event you know should be there) and confirm that it's there.

The editor I use mostly is TextWrangler, a slightly pared down (and free) version of BBEdit. UltraEdit is also awesome (not free but not expensive), especially for cross-platform (Windows/Mac) users. It also has the extra special feature of being able to view/edit files of any size by turning off the "safety net" of having a copy of the data in memory before you alter the stored (disk) version. That is, it gives you the capability to operate directly on the the data file and make changes real-time. Why? You're not limited by amount of your system memory. Think of riding in an elevator in a very tall skyscraper; you can go to any floor along the way, and when the doors open, you're looking at the "data" at that point, without having to store the entire building's data in memory at any one time. Since icbu files can get pretty large, I like to have this tool in my back pocket.