iCal Search Problem
I’ve recently discovered that iCal’s search is not showing me all of the matches. If I go to the right months I can see the events there, but they don’t appear in the search results list. This is a big problem! So far, I’ve noticed:
- The events do appear in the search results on my iPhone.
- Deleting the file ~/Library/Calendars/Calendar Cache didn’t help.
- The events do not appear in Spotlight search results from the Finder.
- According to a BBEdit search, there do not seem to be .ics files for these events in the folder ~/Library/Calendars/«UUID».calendar/Events/ or in an iCal export.
I suppose the solution is to get iCal to regenerate the .ics files in the Events folder, but I’m not sure how best to do this. Apple has instructions for resetting Sync Services, but I worry that this would cause it to overwrite the Sync Services database with the incomplete .ics files, whereas I want to do the reverse.
Update (2011-10-13): Alas, Mac OS X 10.7.2 did not fix the search problem.
4 Comments RSS · Twitter
I think Synchrospector.app (in /Developer/Applications/Utilities/) gives you some fine-tuning ability to determine what gets sync'ed where. Worth a try if you haven't already.
Well, perhaps a full clone backup, followed by exporting an iCal Archive from within iCal, followed by deleting all Sync Services, iCal, and Calendar library folders, followed by a re-import of the iCal Archive might be worth a try. If it doesn't work, just restore the clone backup, and you'll just have lost some time.
(Maybe Apple has a secret plan to force customers away from all Apple apps. Step #1: Move 'em from FCPX to Adobe Premiere, and from iCal to BusyCal. Step #2 ???. Step #3 Profit.)
Personally, I'm still lovin' Snowy. It's an OS for folks who actually like getting things done on their computers.
@Eurobubba Thanks. I actually did try Synchrospector but didn’t see anything out of the ordinary there. Sync Services seems fine; the problem seems to be with iCal.
@Chucky The iCal export/archive seems to be just a copy of the current .ics files; it even copied the labels that I had applied in the Finder to mark the ones I was investigating. I decided that I didn’t want to go down this path, spend a lot of time, and possibly mess things up further—given that everything works on the iPhone. So I installed BusyCal. I’d tried it before it liked it better than iCal in some ways and worse in others. The search works, plus it’s leather-free and I get a source list of calendars and mini-months.
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