iCal dummy events

No idea but after struggling for a week to find the problem for my calendar not syncing with iCloud or iphone etc I have just found 14,600 dummy events on 1 January 1970. So I guess that has taking me over my quota and hence the 507 errors I keep getting. Now it just locks the programm while it tries to access them all. I think my problems will be over if I can figure out how to delete them!! Any ideas out there.

I've now found the the events seem to be listed in iCloud. When I go to 1 January 1970 I find I can't load events in the first and last calendar in the list, so I suspect there are the best part of 20,000 events lurking in there. The server tries to load them but then fails after a few minutes and reports an error to send to Apple. The only way I can think of fixing this is to delete those calendars, but I don't want to lose the data. If I export and then re-import I suspect I re-introduce the problem. A bit more thinking required. Thanks for your reply.

The only way I could fix it was to export what I could to my mac and then delete all from the server. Then importing each calendar in turn, doing a search for "dummy" and then deleting all that came up. Over 5000 of them so far. I'm still trying to find a way of importing the one that 14,600 entries for 1 - 2pm on 1 January 1970. I'm trying to find a way of editing the calendar before I take it online and get locked out of the server. But at least I have a working calendar again. A strange bug that seems to be in the system and I'm not convinced it isn't going to come back.

I got this problem after clean install of ML. By accident I found I had 25 000 iCal events called "dummy", all on Jan 1st 1970. After trying to delete them in iCal, with truckloads of spinning beach balls and dozens of Forced quits, I had a look inside the ics file, and this is how they look:

BEGIN:VEVENT

CREATED:20120824T174009Z

UID:E67E4327-8746-4079-9D9E-31FA4DC71A16

DTEND;TZID=Europe/Oslo:19700101T020000

TRANSP:OPAQUE

SUMMARY:dummy

DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Oslo:19700101T010000

DTSTAMP:20120824T174009Z

SEQUENCE:1

BEGIN:VALARM

X-WR-ALARMUID:92778ECD-7357-42EC-9479-90A207D563E2

UID:92778ECD-7357-42EC-9479-90A207D563E2

TRIGGER:-PT5M

X-APPLE-DEFAULT-ALARM:TRUE

ATTACH;VALUE=URI:Basso

ACTION:AUDIO

END:VALARM

END:VEVENT

I tried to find a way to search and replace, but gave up. In the end I just copied all events from this and next year to a new calendar en deleted the old one. It shrank from 19 Mb to 585 kb. Now it syncs fine again. Regards

That was the only way I could get back to syncing, too. However, it hasn't cured the problem. I check every couple of days, searching for dummy events and often find that more have arrived, so I delete them. For a small number, less than 1000, it is quick to delete them. I don't want to let it build back up to the point where there are 10,000+ as that does seem to slow things down so much that it is difficult to delete them.

I had hoped that the last upgrade of ML would cure it but no joy.

It only seems to happen when I leave the calendar app open on my mac mini. No problems generated by it been open on my macbook air. But that still uses Lion - it is too old to update - and the problem only arose after I updated the mini.

In my case it appears from the date stamps that all (most of) these events were created on 20120824, which was around the time I upgraded to ML. Regards

I cleared all the dummies at 16:29 and from 16:30 to 16:45 it has created 46 more. I can see them popping up as I have the calendar open at January 1970. Bizarre. I wish I could stop it. Across all 9 of my calendars seemingly chosing them at random.

I have the exact same problem here...

lots of "dummy" events created on January 1st, 1970... I removed some of them, which resolved the 507 errors I got when trying to sync with iCloud... It's almost impossible to get rid of all of them, because it's so slow...

Any Idea on how to remove them all at once ?

The best way I managed is to do it in Mountain Lion. Search for dummy in calendar and it lists them down the right-hand side and I was able to delete batches at a time fairly quickly. This wasn't so good in earlier versions e.g. Lion. I was checking everyday as they kept coming back and deleting much smaller groups up to about 400. The one with 14,000 entries I never sorted as it did take too long. I just deleted the calendar and started again. Although I exported it first. I may go back and try and fix it one day - if I need to prove to someone that I met them on a certain day.

Thankfully, the problem has stopped, I hope. No dummy events for a week.

Hi Eddie, thanks for the answer.

mine has over 23 000 entries... I have mountain lion and tried the search and delete on the right hand side, but it seems I can only delete 5-6 at a time, when I'm lucky... When I try with more iCal just freezes. I don't really want to delete the calendar, for the reasons you mentioned...

I finally found this: http://www.busymac.com/utils/icalcleaner.html

It removes the duplicate events automatically, but it's extremelly slow... at least that prevents the 507 error with iCloud.

I think I'll run ical cleaner every day, until Apple comes with a correction for this...

I really wonder how this bug came out...

Cheers

Tim

It surprises me that the Apple iCal team is absolutely quiet on this issue?

I cehcked again, and found two of the same dummies generated since my fix (about one month ago). So the problem is persistent although not dramatic.

Regards

I am surprised that it isn't happening to more people. If it is they are not aware of it yet. I didn't find it until the 507 error started and then I tracked it down to the dummy events but that took me a few days to find that.

But there seems to be nothing from Apple about it. It has slowed down for me. There were no dummies for the past week, but 1 came up today. I think persistently deleting has slowed the bug down. Why, I've not idea.

Thanks Tim for the tip on icalcleaner. I think 23,000 is a lot to work through so I'm not surprised it's slow, but at least it is automatic.

You welcome Eddie...

yes, I guess a lot of people don't even know about it... The problem apparently happened with mountain Lion, so It was not that long ago. Like you, I didn't notice until the 507 error. I hope more people complain about this here, so that maybe somebody at Apple will listen and fix it... I was hoping for a fix with 10.8.2, but the problem is still there...

Tim