The iCal Incident

As many of you know, I am an extremely busy person. There is no possible way for me to manage all my appointments, so for the past year, I have been using iCal, Apple's integrated calendar application. It has a wonderful interface, it's easy to use, it's powerful, and it automatically syncs my contacts and appointments to my iPod. I use iCal so often, that I have developed a dependency on it to some degree.

There are just a few things that I wish I could do with it.

For example, now that I have a fully-functional laptop, I would love to synchronize my calendars between the two computers. This is possible if you have a .Mac account, but I am not willing to pay $99.00 per year just to have synchronization capabilities, and perhaps a backup solution.

Ah, yes, the "B" word. Famous last words for anyone who has never suffered from data loss. Backing up data should be of utmost importance for those who store essential files in electronic form. A computer crash is not a matter of if, but a matter of when. A few days ago, I came very close to a major loss of data.

I was changing some appointments in iCal, when the program began acting a little finicky. It wouldn't let me change some of the parameters of my appointments, such as recurrent appointments. Then, for some reason, the calendar kept jumping back to September 15th whenever I wanted to modify an appointment. The next thing I knew, iCal had erased every single one of my appointments.

iCal is one of these new-fangled programs that doesn't have a Save function. It's database driven, and when you create an entry, it is automatically written to disk. It's designed for idiots like me who forget to save often. In this case, I knew that those appointments couldn't be salvaged. The undo command was ghosted, and if I closed the program, I knew that more than a year of appointments would have disappeared. I stopped for a few moments, and considered my options.

I had created a database backup of my iCal appointments, but the file was about 90 days old, and I felt that there would be far too many appointments for me to re-enter.

I had found a way to migrate all my appointments to my iBook via a wireless network. I did this about a week ago, and it had the most recent archive of my contacts. I obviously would have had to enter a few additional appointments, but this would be the safest option. So I booted my iBook, and transferred all the appointments from the laptop back to my iMac.

I launched iCal, and all the appointments appeared properly. I spent five minutes re-entering the lost appointments -- the ones that I could remember off the top of my head.

And then I thought long and hard about the importance of my digital life. I am absent-minded, and when I remember to make backups of my data, it's usually at the wrong time, or I'm not at my computer. I needed a solution that would do the heavy lifting for me.

.Mac would be a perfect solution, if I were willing to spend $99US per year. But like I said earlier, I'm cheap, and I give Apple plenty of money each year -- like, in the four-digit range.

What happened next can only be described as an epiphany. I decided I would write a script to make a local backup of my essential calendar files on a daily basis. The problem is, I'm not one who knows a lot about Applescript.

Enter Automator. It's a little clunkier, and it doesn't always do everything you want it to, but I figured I'd snoop around and look at the workflows and see if I could build something that would work, to some degree.

So I made a simple workflow that would select my iCal database files, create an archive of them, append the date to the file name, and save the archive to a specified folder. It's a primitive script, but it worked. I then saved the workflow as an application, and placed the program in my login items. Every time I log into the computer, the script executes.

This solved my backup issues, but it did not solve the problem of syncing the calendar files between my computer and the laptop.

I did a number of searches on the web, and although I did not find -- exactly -- a perfect solution to my query, I learned of iCal Exchange. This allows a Mac user to have an on-line archive of his calendar available for public (and/or private) viewing. I have my calendars on iCal set to automatically publish changes in my appointments, so there is one more issue I don't have to worry about.

The best thing about the iCal Exchange, is that I can log into any computer and check my appointments. Actually, even better yet, the iCal Exchange is a free service.

I also created a public calendar, which is available for everyone to view. I have published a calendar of my upcoming performances. It is available here, or you can navigate to the top of the sidebar, and click the link in the "Tour Dates" section. My calendar has also been added to the Blogroll. Once you navigate to the iCal Exchange site, the interface is similar to any other calendar program. You can view by day, week, month, etc., so if you just see a blank page, I would suggest navigating to the monthly calendar.

For the time being, I'm going to consider what kind of improvements I can make to my Automator script, so that I don't have to clean out a folder that has a million backup archives in it.