Birthday calendar duplicated hundreds of times on iOS 10

I'm having the same problem.

I have both "calendar" and "birthday" duplication.

I solved the former upgrading to the 10.1.1 but I think that it's something about the iOS update process, nothing about some particular bug fixes.

I can't sort out the latter.

Effects:

- general lags in calendar but even in other apps

- battery draining

I'm just using the iCloud account to sync the calendar.

Yes this is an extremely irritating bug. I checked my iCloud for anything amiss and all looks normal there. My older iPad running iOS 9.3.3 isn't affected the same so it seems purely to be an iOS 10 issue. I unticked in iOS calendar settings one of the duplicate birthday calendars for now to prevent duplication of birthdays showing in the calendar. The duplication also has knock on effects to my Apple Watch but that's another story. Apple needs to fix this - I find the constant iOS updates frustrating in that they always introduce new bugs to the mix that then go unfixed or non acknowledged for a long time

I have exactly the same problem. My battery drains super fast and I can't use the Calendar anymore, it's just too slow. I turned off all the calendars, my hundreds of birthday calendars turned into regular Calendar, and there is no way to bulk delete them. It takes 5 minutes to delete one, and then the Calendar App crashes! Apple you really need to get this sorted out!!!

Alex

I'm having the same issue. I noticed hundreds of duplicate birthday calendars a few months ago, probably around around when iOS10 or iPhone 7 came out and I traded phones. Didn't have any freezing/lagging/crashing issues, so I manually deselected all of the duplicates and went on as normal. Just within the last few weeks have both Calendars and Reminders become unusable. Phone was losing battery quickly and I saw Calendars had ~70% battery usage.

I contacted chat support and their answer was to first try "reset all settings." This just helped Reminders work for a day, but it went back to lagging and freezing. Can't access Calendar settings, or even the app itself. Settings for Contacts and Mail Accounts are also incredibly slow. Support's next course of action is to erase and restore from a backup to see if the corruption is in the backup. Sounds like for everyone here it is so I'm not hopeful.

Really frustrated that the only current solution is to erase the phone and start fresh. I've got 8 years of data on here... It's clearly a bug in their software and they need to assume responsibility for it.

Has anyone tried this solution? I'm on the road with a laptop so I haven't tried yet.

https://deciphertools.com/blog/birthday-calendar-duplicates-ios10/

This worked for me! Well worth the $30 to buy that program. I backed up my phone and it ran a repair over it. Restored my phone from the repaired backup and no duplicate calendars!

Will report back if any issues occur, but so far so good. After getting back in touch with Apple, their only solution was to restore phone as new so I'm glad not to have to do that.

Great find, proffromboulder. I had previously attempted to do exactly this with the iBackupBot tool, but the tool never did anything except crash on launch. Good to hear that someone else offers a working tool to edit backups. I'll keep it in mind if another client ever walks in with the same problem. (Apple Store already completely reinitialized my previous client's iPad to "get around" this problem, lost all his local data.)

Am pleased that worked but Apple needs to address this in an iOS update - too many people with this problem and nuking data and restoring from backup is very time consuming and still risky. It's a draconian fix for something Apple has broken. I'd wager there are a great many with this issue, when I checked my families phones they all had duplicate birthday calendars too under other. Ticking them made the same birthday for an iCloud contact appear multiple times. Unchecking them and leaving just the last calendar ticked made only a single birthday entry appear. Tellingly the only devices I have seen that don't have the problem are iOS 9 ones because the hardware is too old to get iOS 10. I don't even think it was initially a problem when iOS 10 was released but introduced by one of the many updates to it since. Either way Apple needs to fix it

amanda-z: Does the program work with encrypted backups? Or do they have to be unprotected? I'd be curious to try it, but also don't want to lose all my protected settings/keys/etc again.

Devalias - it does work with encrypted backups! Mine is one as well.

Ridiculous I had to shell out $$ for this when I already purchased Apple Care, but I really couldn't deal without my calendars any longer.

It worked for me too. Sadly it's totally worth the $30.

I know that iBackupBot would not work on encrypted backups, so I am assuming that this tool won't either. But since you want the most current backup available to restore from anyway, just turn encryption off in iTunes and make a fresh backup, perform your surgery on that one, and reload it.

Not 100% on the specifics, but I believe a bunch of things like passwords/keychain/etc aren't backed up if it's not encrypted.

I'd find a hard reference that backs that up before claiming it. It may or may not be true of an iCloud backup, but I don't think this has ever been true of an iTunes backup, which for its first few years didn't even offer encryption.

I don't have evidence on hand, but that was in reference to iTunes telling me (probably not word for word, but the gist of) that when I went to make an unencrypted backup before moving from my iPhone 6 to 7. So, probably a legit source.