Power Calendaring with iCal, Google Calendar, and Sync

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My calendar grows increasingly crazy as the various ventures I work with continue to gain popularity, from the Student Loan Network and the Financial Aid Podcast to Marketing Over Coffee and PodCamp. Recently, I found myself having to sync two iPods, a phone, Google Calendar, and iCal, and in the process, a whole bunch of things got badly messed up.

Here’s how I fixed it.

First, I took Google Calendar – since that’s where I do most of my data entry – and exported the calendars there as iCal ics files. Those I saved to my desktop.

I deleted my entire Google Calendar, top to bottom.

I also reset sync on all my devices, effectively telling those devices to start from scratch the next time they started up.

After all the external points were deleted and reset, I disconnected everything and started up iCal. I imported all the different ics files and found I had a calendar about 10 times as large as I expected. Literally had half a dozen entries for every single event, which was unmanageable to say the least.

I found this terrific script called iCal Dupe Deleter (donationware). Ran it against iCal overnight (it took that long!) and when I woke up this morning, I had a clean calendar, free of duplicate events, ready for the world.

I connected all the mobile devices, synced them, then connected back to Google Calendar using Spanning Sync. Now iCal was serving as the master record, and everything else got copies of iCal. Going forward, Google Calendar will remain the data import point for new events, but iCal will still be the “golden master” if I need to do this manual re-sync process again to de-dupe and clean up.

Disclosures: Spanning Sync, by the way, is $65, just so you know. I get zilch from recommending it.

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Comments

13 responses to “Power Calendaring with iCal, Google Calendar, and Sync”

April 30, 2008

C.C. Chapman

A killer post Chris. Thanks for writing it.

Have you ever seen items you add directly to Google Calendar (especially when they are invites from other people) NOT syncing up to iCal using Spanning Sync? I’ve been having this problem a lot lately and can’t figure out why and wasn’t sure if I was along.

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April 30, 2008

C.C. Chapman

A killer post Chris. Thanks for writing it.

Have you ever seen items you add directly to Google Calendar (especially when they are invites from other people) NOT syncing up to iCal using Spanning Sync? I’ve been having this problem a lot lately and can’t figure out why and wasn’t sure if I was along.

Reply
April 30, 2008

Ariel Hyatt

Wow I woke up this morning wondering ow to synch my ical with my google calendar and there you are! Fabulous. Thanks So much Chris.

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April 30, 2008

Ariel Hyatt

Wow I woke up this morning wondering ow to synch my ical with my google calendar and there you are! Fabulous. Thanks So much Chris.

Reply
April 30, 2008

Christopher S. Penn

@CC – never had that happen, but occasionally, it’s probably not a bad idea to do this “hard reset” every so often.

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April 30, 2008

Christopher S. Penn

@CC – never had that happen, but occasionally, it’s probably not a bad idea to do this “hard reset” every so often.

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April 30, 2008

Chel Wolverton

You can also subscribe to your gcal in iCal. I put all events into gcal and let it sync up with iCal through subscription and then load it onto my iPhone.

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April 30, 2008

Michelle/chelpixie

You can also subscribe to your gcal in iCal. I put all events into gcal and let it sync up with iCal through subscription and then load it onto my iPhone.

Reply
May 9, 2008

Joe Andersen

I’ve got a few more cogs in my system – because my media server is still windows based (and right now isn’t internetting on a local network with my mac b/c of difficulties with my router) so I need to use outlook to pull my calendar down from gcal to itunes to my ipod… but the mac side of the system runs nicely (at least until my 15day trial of spanning sync runs out and I have to decide if it really is as useful as I want it to be)

Joe

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May 9, 2008

Joe Andersen

I’ve got a few more cogs in my system – because my media server is still windows based (and right now isn’t internetting on a local network with my mac b/c of difficulties with my router) so I need to use outlook to pull my calendar down from gcal to itunes to my ipod… but the mac side of the system runs nicely (at least until my 15day trial of spanning sync runs out and I have to decide if it really is as useful as I want it to be)

Joe

Reply
February 22, 2009

Photography

Dear Christopher, Thanks for the great advice. I am going to back my calendar up twice before deleting everything but am ready to do this tomorrow.

Reply
February 23, 2009

Photography

Dear Christopher, Thanks for the great advice. I am going to back my calendar up twice before deleting everything but am ready to do this tomorrow.

Reply
February 23, 2009

Photography

Dear Christopher, Thanks for the great advice. I am going to back my calendar up twice before deleting everything but am ready to do this tomorrow.

Reply