Friday, July 20, 2012

How to Easily Delete EVERYTHING in iCal

I've had some issues with OSX iCal, where the sync with work's Exchange server got interrupted when I changed my password, I then added some events to iCal, noticed syncing wasn't working, created the event again directly in Exchange using Outlook, and then realized that I had to edit iCal's settings to change the exchange password to resume syncing. This caused mysterious sync problems with iCal, and it would run into issues of event conflicts, and would take turns going online, offline, and then sending email notifications to co-workers that I'd accepted or declined their event. After about the third time it went online, offline, online and resend email notifications, I've decided thats enough, and would like to start fresh with iCal. However, Apple has "The Apple Way" of deleting all events, and all everything from iCal, and it makes no sense to me. Thus, I have to create a posting on:

How to Easily Delete EVERYTHING in iCal

So you can perhaps re-enable sync with your server.

Step 1 - Remove Server Sync Accounts

You don't want to delete any events that are safely stored on the server. So go to iCal -- Preferences -- Accounts, and then delete your server account (Exchange in my case).

Step 2 - Realize that there's no Delete All button in the iCal preferences or anywhere, and start Googling for advice, and hopefully arrive here at this blog post.

Go to: www.google.com
...

Step 3 - Go to the Calendars button, create a new Calendar, and delete your existing Calendar.

After your server account is deleted, the Calendars button should have a default Calendar called "No Category". You can't delete that if thats the only calendar that exists, so create a new calendar, by Right Clicking, and adding a new calendar.


After the new calendar is created (I called it Temporary), you can delete the old calendar that has the offline / synced events that you wish to delete. To delete your old / cached information, right click on "No Category" and select Delete.



And accept the confirmation to actually delete everything. 


Warning: If that was your Calendar that had all your information, it will delete it. Please ensure that you've followed the above advice before clicking Delete (for reals), that you've removed your sync connection to any of your server based calendar systems (such as Exchange), so that you don't actually delete your Calendar events that you perhaps share with your colleagues.

5 comments:

  1. Thanks Peter.
    This is useful and to the point.

    Hamed

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  2. Thanks. Your a lifesaver. This is typical MAC. Make things so dummed down it is a pain to clean up their mess.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks so much for your help here!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Great! Thank you very much!

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  5. Thank you for this. I chuckled at Step 2. So true.

    ReplyDelete

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