iCal Calendar Colors Changing On Their Own; iCloud Connection

AGGRAVATING PROBLEM:

Many in this forum have written recently about a problem ongoing for people with multiple iCal calendars where iCal calendar colors change "automatically" when you haven't selected those colors, or even "change back" before your eyes to some color your DIDN'T select after you select a new one. If you log into iCloud on the Web and try to change the color of certain calendars, they refuse to change. Try as you might, the color you want for your calendar won't "stick" and it is forced to be the wrong color on all your devices. In some cases, even the names of some of the calendars cannot be changed. On other calendars in your list, the colors and names will change fine.

Related symptoms: Calendars you have deleted "come back." Or, calendars you did not create yourself show up in your calendars list, such as "Calendar" or "Home" or even "Untitled." Note that the problem seems to be most prevalent with calendars with names "Home," "Work," OR either of these words in the NAME of the calendar. For instance, "Bob's Work" might get snagged (it can't be deleted without coming back or its color is stuck and "comes back").

I spent a long time on the phone with a helpful Apple senior advanced specialist on this problem today. We conducted a very large number of "experiments". Our family has two iPads, 2 iPhones, and 2 iMacs, so it was easy to rule things in or out. I will present some information that may help.

SOME OF WHAT APPEARS TO BE GOING ON:

First, Apple has not resolved this. But the problem appears to be related to iCloud, and NOT to individual devices. After de-linking all of my individual devices from iCloud, I could change any of the colors or names at will on any given device, create new calendars and then change their colors to whatever I wish, delete calendars, change names...no problem. However, after re-linking calendars to iCloud, all the problems mentioned above returned. The chances that my iMacs, iPhones, and iPads are all causing the problem independently is very low. They also have slightly different OS versions on them, so it is not likely an a particular device OS, though that could be indirectly related. Also, the colors "change back" within about the same time (usually a few seconds to up to 30 seconds) that it takes to do a "refresh" (i.e. an update) to the iCloud servers. This when iCloud is turned on, and the absence of it when iCloud is turned off (for calendars), strongly suggests that it is the iCloud server and its interaction with your devices that the fundamental cause of the problem.

Apple has said that they are aware of this problem and their engineers are working on a fix. Historically, this can mean just a few days, or it could be a few months, years, or "whenever." They don't give estimates of when it will be fixed. Exactly WHY this is happening is unclear, but my guess is that it is a modification to the iCloud server code that Apple implemented without testing it thoroughly enough to discover this problem. Apple does not admit to that, of course and I don't know if I am correct.

A WORKAROUND SOLUTION THAT WORKED FOR ME:

Please note this is a workaround and not a full fix. Apple needs to run a patch on their iCloud server code. Until then, I did the following which seems to have worked for me for now. Read the whole list before deciding whether to proceed. I don't guarantee it will work in all situations.

Note...I found I was stuck for now with the color of ONE of my calendars. If you are like me, you want to keep that one and work around it....

Backup first... Make sure that your iCloud copy of your calendar data has the calendar event information you want to save - even if the color is wrong. Log in at www.icloud.com and do a refresh to sync to the Cloud. Check over your calendars online to make sure the event data appears to be there for all of your calendars (even if their color or name is not what you want).

Steps:

1. Go to every device that you have linked to iCloud separately. Go into Settings, iCloud, and then uncheck the "Calendars" option. This delinks your calendars for that device to iCloud. As you do this on each device, when prompted, select "Keep On My" ..iPAD...iPhone...iMac... etc. This will preserve the calendar information on the device so it won't be deleted. I think this is safer, but you can click on "Delete" if you want, too. Note - if one of your devices is an iMac, with OSX Lion and before, you may be forced (I was) to delete the iCloud calendars from the iMac. So again, make sure they are backed up to the Cloud first (or somewhere else).

3. With the iCloud Calendars Option on all your devices still turned off, go to the WEB and log into iCloud.com. You need to figure our which calendar iCloud won't let you change the color for. You probably already know. On iCloud.com, click on "Calendars," then click open your calendar list and select "EDIT" at the bottom of the dialog box. One at a time, click on the color dots next to each calendar name and try to change the color (you can put any back after the test if you want). You will probably see a certain one that just goes right back to what you don't want. This is the one for which the color is stuck, but you may be able to change the name of it now that your devices are unlinked from iCloud.

4. Still in iCloud.com, change the names and colors of any of the other calendars you wish to change. Delete any empty calendars that mysteriously appeared without your wanting them. Take note of all the calendars, names, and colors that are on the final list of calendars.

5. On EVERY device, BEFORE turning iCloud back on on ANY of them: Change the colors and/or names of calendars, delete calendars, etc. so that the calendar names and colors on the device are exactly the same as what you left in iCloud.com in the last step.

6. One at a time on each device, go back to Settings and then "iCloud" and check again the box for "Calendars." You will be asked whether you want to "MERGE" your data with iCloud. I selected MERGE to ensure I didn't lose anything. Link each device again into iCloud one at a time.

7. When each device is back, go back to iCloud on the Web, or go into iCAL on one of your devices. Set to view ALL calendars. Look for duplicates of some of your events. I found quite several as an artifact of "merging", but in my case it only took me about 5 minutes to go through quickly and delete the duplicates. It deleted the duplicates on all of the devices at once, so I only needed to delete dups on one device. I did not find that I lost any events as long as I kept one valid copy.

Again, no guarantees...hope this works for others. Good luck.