iCal Syncing and MobileMe Calendar Woes Redux, February 2011

I’ve been getting lots of synchronization errors, failures, and duplicate events and calendars. (102 calendars, a dozen of which were legitimate.) Someone at the BusyCal booth at MacWorld said the new MobileMe calendar format was much less data-corrupting, but the upgrade process failed, so I've tried some drastic pruning. For duplicate events, iCal Cleaner can delete all intra-calendar duplicates, at least in small calendars. iCal Dupe Deleter can handle a large calendar, but only one at a time. Neither handles inter-calendar duplicates. For duplicate calendars, which may be due to Guided Ways’ 2Do’s flakey Wifi synchronization, I'm trying a semi-manual purge. There are iCalendar validators on the web, but none that run locally, and I'd rather not entrust seventeen years of personal data to a server, unless I really have to. (A small calendar passed validation.)

For large calendars with interesting data, I run the following AppleScript , then copy the log output to a BBEdit document it, massage it by inserting line-breaks, and then sort. Repeat, and diff. 

tell application "iCal"
	set ThisCal to "Calendar name here"
	set theCalendarCount to count of events in calendar ThisCal
	set theTitles to summary of every event in calendar ThisCal
end tell

This sometimes hangs, but after finishing. It also sometimes misses events; three times an event showed up in the diffs as being in a bogus calendar, but not the original, when an iCal search turned it up in both places.

For shorter calendar(s), I simply check it/them in the Calendar list, and search for "e". The type icon distinguishes events (which I care about) from ToDos, which I will bulk delete, and restore from 2Do. I assumed a non-empty calendar would have at least one meeting with an "e" in it, though one did have only the single event "judging".

Once I see which duplicate calendar deserves to be nuked (occasionally I had to manually move a couple of meetings from the runner-up to the winner), I export it, using a Keyboard Maestro macro plus two Enters. (A system keyboard shortcut doesn't work, since Export appears at two levels of the hierarchy.) Then I select Delete (also with a macro) and enter.

I then nuked all the ToDos in all the calendars; I’ll restore them eventually from ToDo on the device.

This eventually allowed me to upgrade my MobileMe calendar on the second try. Resetting Sync Data on my second Mac worked badly several times, with lots of duplicates. I ended up following a suggestion to delete the Library calendar and cache files, and eventually the prefs file as well. Even then, syncing resulted in a lot of duplicates, so I restored from a backup and reset the sync data yet again.

Bus Error

After trying the suggested workaround, syncing my iPhone to MobileMe (which I wanted to avoid; previous attempts at MobileMe syncing on my iPhone were buggy), I get a bus error when I launch Calendar:

Exception Type:  EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGBUS)
Exception Codes: KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE at 0x00000024
Crashed Thread:  0

Thread 0 Crashed:
0   AppSupport                    	0x309ebfc8 0x309e4000 + 32712
1   EventKit                      	0x343ae8e8 0x3438c000 + 141544
2   EventKit                      	0x343adb06 0x3438c000 + 137990
3   EventKit                      	0x343adc94 0x3438c000 + 138388
4   CoreFoundation                	0x3148e588 0x31430000 + 386440
5   EventKit                      	0x343ada0a 0x3438c000 + 137738
6   AppSupport                    	0x309e810a 0x309e4000 + 16650
7   EventKit                      	0x343acbee 0x3438c000 + 134126
8   libSystem.B.dylib             	0x3123ccdc 0x31165000 + 883932
9   EventKit                      	0x343ad53c 0x3438c000 + 136508
10  EventKitUI                    	0x36023f5e 0x36016000 + 57182
11  MobileCal                     	0x00008892 0x1000 + 30866
12  MobileCal                     	0x000086bc 0x1000 + 30396
13  MobileCal                     	0x0000830a 0x1000 + 29450
14  MobileCal                     	0x00007f96 0x1000 + 28566
15  MobileCal                     	0x00006c9c 0x1000 + 23708
16  Foundation                    	0x31cd861c 0x31cc4000 + 83484
17  CoreFoundation                	0x3145711c 0x31430000 + 160028
18  CoreFoundation                	0x31456dbc 0x31430000 + 159164
19  Foundation                    	0x31cc7d1c 0x31cc4000 + 15644
20  Foundation                    	0x31cd123a 0x31cc4000 + 53818
21  MobileCal                     	0x00003886 0x1000 + 10374
22  MobileCal                     	0x000075d8 0x1000 + 26072
23  Foundation                    	0x31cd861c 0x31cc4000 + 83484
24  CoreFoundation                	0x3145711c 0x31430000 + 160028
25  CoreFoundation                	0x31456dbc 0x31430000 + 159164
26  CoreFoundation                	0x31471446 0x31430000 + 267334
27  EventKit                      	0x343ac322 0x3438c000 + 131874
28  libSystem.B.dylib             	0x3123b678 0x31165000 + 878200
29  libSystem.B.dylib             	0x3123be30 0x31165000 + 880176
30  CoreFoundation                	0x314582a4 0x31430000 + 164516
31  CoreFoundation                	0x31457c80 0x31430000 + 162944
32  CoreFoundation                	0x31457b88 0x31430000 + 162696
33  GraphicsServices              	0x35d664a4 0x35d62000 + 17572
34  GraphicsServices              	0x35d66550 0x35d62000 + 17744
35  UIKit                         	0x338d5322 0x3389e000 + 226082
36  UIKit                         	0x338d2e8c 0x3389e000 + 216716
37  MobileCal                     	0x000029d4 0x1000 + 6612
38  MobileCal                     	0x00002974 0x1000 + 6516

My Calendar setting for syncing to MobileMe got switched off (this couldn't be user error, as the problem only started when I switched it on.) The bus error got better after I switched the preference on again, but I now have disordered duplicate calendars on the iPhone again.

I got rid of the duplicate Calendars by turning off syncing, choosing Delete, and then enabling it again.

Tips

Earlier MobileMe Woes

iCal Woes

iCal Upgrade Woes

2Do Sync Woes

© 2010 Flash Sheridan. This page: iCal Sync and MobileMe Woes. Updated 20 February 2011
See also PalmOS to iPhoneOS migration notes