Cure a calendar crash on Mac
Q. OS X’s Calendar app hung up on me, so I force-quit it. Now it doesn’t show any of my events and instead stays stuck on an “Updating calendars…” prompt. How do I get past that?
A. I’ve had this happen enough times on my MacBook Air--although not, for whatever reason, on my older iMac--that I’ve all but memorized the routine to fix it.
Should your Mac’s copy of Calendar undergo this malfunction and fail to progress past a useless state in which it displays none of your existing schedules and has that “Updating calendars…” message stuck in front, you should first try restarting.
I know, I know; tech-support departments always say that. But it doesn’t hurt to try.
If that doesn’t work, you should make sure you have a backup of your calendars before you do anything else.
That should be nearly automatic in most Mac setups: Either you have your calendar synchronized to an online service like Google Calendar or Apple’s iCloud, or you have Apple’s Time Machine software automatically backing it up to a separate hard drive.
(If you had Time Machine active but recently had its backups stop because this OS X utility said your backup drive was out of space, see my advice on freeing up room. If you have no backup at all, please buy an external hard drive and set up Time Machine before you do anything else with your computer.)
Now switch to the Finder, hold down the Option key, click the “Go” menu and select the normally-hidden “Library” folder you revealed by holding down that modifier key.
The Library folder is the system’s designated store for data that individual applications use but which you don’t view or edit outside of those apps. Think browser bookmarks, your e-mail archives, application preferences… and your calendars.
OS X hides your Library by default--until 2011’s OS X Lion, it was viewable like any of your account’s other folders, from Documents to Downloads, but then Apple decided it was too risky to keep visible. I didn’t get the logic of that and still don’t, as it impedes routine troubleshooting like this and the Bluetooth snafu I covered here in April.
With the Library open you should see a “Calendars” folder there. Delete that folder, reboot the Mac, empty the trash and then start up Calendar.
If your experience is like mine, Calendar should automatically pick up your synced calendars from Google or Apple’s servers. If you only had your schedules stored on your Mac, use that Option-click trick to make the Library folder visible, then click the Time Machine icon in the Dock to see your backups of that folder, then select Calendars to have that restored from this backup.
Note that if you’d hidden some of your calendars (for instance, Google Calendar includes a U.S.-holiday calendar that duplicates the one in OS X), they will now be visible again in the app. To hide them, click to clear the checkboxes next to those.
If, on the other hand, your experience isn’t like mine, please let me know in a comment or an e-mail.
Rob Pegoraro is a tech writer based out of Washington, D.C. To submit a tech question, e-mail Rob at rob@robpegoraro.com. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/robpegoraro.