Q: How do I restore my iCal settings?
Situation:
1. I have a Time Machine Backup on a USB disk.
2. Until last night, I had a working iCal setup that connected to my company's owncloud calendar server (CalDAV). Had been working for months.
3. On my MacBook Pro, I have two disks - a) Macintosh HD (no filevault or anything fancy), b) Encrypted (using VeraCrypt) where all my data lives.
4. I have working Mail setup where my Mail is actually on the Encrypted disk, while a symlink (ln -s ~/Encrypt/Library/Mail ~/Library/) lives (~/Encrypt in turn is a symlink to /Volumes/Encrypt). This setup works. Has for years, in every Mac I have ever owned. It saves me the bother of worrying about my Mails being accessed if the Mac is stolen, and the fear of having to backup everything if I have to wipe Macintosh HD clean in an upgrade.
5. Last night, I had the bright idea of doing the same thing with ~/Library/Calendars. So, I moved it to ~/Encrypt/Library and created the symlink. Now iCal would crash. Unlike Mail, iCal seems to care that the folder it accesses can't be a symlink.
6. No biggie. I move the Calender folder back after removing the symlink. No joy. As ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iCal.plist modification date is new. Looks like iCal recreated the plist?
7. So, I delete everything, assuming that this is a nice lesson, and delete ~/Library/Calendars, and the plist and relaunch. I find a stale entry of the CalDAV account under System Preferences. A hint that these two locations are not comprehensively the entire content of iCal. No idea. I delete the account and recreate it.
8. Strange wrinkle. I use Advanced under CalDAV as I need to specify username, password, server address for the owncloud server, and path to calendars (/owncloud/remote.php/......). I save, and relaunch iCal. Nothing.
9. I look into Preferences>Accounts. On the second tab, the server settings fields are empty. Weird.
10. I enter the correct value in the fields. Before I can leave the tab, the text I just entered vanishes!
11. I cannot even recreate the settings!!
12. I connect the USB disk and fire up Time Machine. Restore ~/Library (after using the default write thingummy to show hidden files) from two days ago. It gives me a choice to overwrite - I take it. Let it complete (I find the login screen when I come back). Relaunch iCal. No joy.
Summary: Messed up iCal settings. Cannot recreate the calendars I need. Cannot seemingly restore from Time Machine backup.
Time Machine settings don't have any explicitly stated exclusions.
This is also the first time I have used Time Machine (only started using it recently) for restoring anything. Usually, I only care about data.
So, short of reinstalling Mac OSX El Capitan and wasting 2 hours, what are my options? Living without the calendars is not an option.
MacBook Pro, OS X El Capitan (10.11.4), null
Posted on Sep 26, 2016 8:56 PM