By Dan Moren
December 3, 2015 6:09 AM PT
Resolving Calendar duplicates
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
My calendar has gotten really packed lately. Unfortunately, this was in large part because something had decided to start duplicating many of my events with wild abandon.
Google Calendar and OS X reeeeeally wants me to remember that it’s Martin Luther King day. pic.twitter.com/fjUv1OTzrS
— Dan Moren (@dmoren) December 2, 2015
Look, I celebrate the legacy of the late Dr. King as much as anybody, but this is a bit excessive.
My main calendar setup involves syncing with a Google account—as I have a lot of shared calendars I don’t rely on iCloud for calendar syncing at all—as well as Apple’s “special” calendars: U.S. Holidays, Birthdays, and El Capitan’s new Found in Mail option. But duplicates only seemed to be appearing on my personal Google calendar and on the Holidays calendar, and only on my iMac—my MacBook and iOS devices were unscathed.
Deleting the extraneous events didn’t help: like comic-book characters, they never seemed to stay gone for long. Force-quitting Calendar and restarting my Mac didn’t seem to have any effect; neither did disabling and re-enabling my calendar accounts—the dupes didn’t always show up at first, but they always seemed to pop in after a bit.
Time for extreme measures. I did some looking around and found this suggestion for dealing with sync problems; it’s a couple years old, but the general ideas remain the same. Turn off all your calendar accounts via the Internet Accounts preference pane or in Calendar’s Preferences, quit Calendar, delete your Calendar files in ~/Library/Preferences/, your ~/Library/Calendars/ folder, and anything calendar-related in ~/Library/Caches/. Then re-open Calendar, which should now be reset to defaults and restore your accounts.
Shazam: duplicates begone! If you’re running into problems with a similar setup, you could do worse than salting the earth calendar.
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]
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