Restoring the contents of a recovered Calendar folder

[indigit4l]

Hi there. This is my first post here, and I could really use some help.

So I reloaded Yosemite for a customer and while I always do a very careful and thorough job of backing up data, I didn't back up her calendar. I guess in this day and age I assume people are syncing it with Apple or Google. It's probably a little more difficult to not sync it somehow, as it's the default way of setting up you Mac or iPhone. Anyways!

Needless to say she is really upset (and so am I, because this is a first) so I bought a data recovery program that can recover data from a formatted drive. I ran it and found her Library/Calendar folder. Inside there are three sub-folders and each one is named like "9EE3DDG46436DF" nonsense. Inside each of those are (If I recall correctly) a lot of .ics files and/or other files with Calendar icons. When I either open one or import one, I believe it adds just a single event to the calendar, or it will say the file isn't fit to be imported. So between the 3 folders, if I can import all of those I am able to, I might have... 30 items in total added.

I tried dropping those folders in the new Calendar directory and nothing seemed to happen. Any advice? I work with PST files all of the time but I don't have a full understanding of the way they do it in OSX, because in the past I would just export it to a single file and import it back in. This Calendar has an Events folder and more.

Any help would be awesome. Thank you.

 

[Lifeisabeach]

So I reloaded Yosemite for a customer and while I always do a very careful and thorough job of backing up data, I didn't back up her calendar.

I'm just gonna gave to beat you up on this. Nothing less than a full system clone should be considered "thorough". If you missed her calendar, then you must not have done a full clone, but rather cherry-picked what you backed up, and that's just a disaster waiting to happen (and has now). There are a few pieces of software that excel at doing this, the 2 most oft recommended being Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper.

Needless to say she is really upset (and so am I, because this is a first) so I bought a data recovery program that can recover data from a formatted drive. I ran it and found her Library/Calendar folder. Inside there are three sub-folders and each one is named like "9EE3DDG46436DF" nonsense. Inside each of those are (If I recall correctly) a lot of .ics files and/or other files with Calendar icons. When I either open one or import one, I believe it adds just a single event to the calendar, or it will say the file isn't fit to be imported. So between the 3 folders, if I can import all of those I am able to, I might have... 30 items in total added.

I tried dropping those folders in the new Calendar directory and nothing seemed to happen. Any advice? I work with PST files all of the time but I don't have a full understanding of the way they do it in OSX, because in the past I would just export it to a single file and import it back in. This Calendar has an Events folder and more.

Any help would be awesome. Thank you.

There's no telling how much of this data is corrupt. I would just try double-clicking each of those .ics files and import them one at a time that way, if you can. What recovery software did you try? And is there a reason why she doesn't sync her calendar (contacts, etc) via iCloud? It costs nothing.

 

[indigit4l]

The problem with cloning the drive.. I would totally have done that but she's going through a nasty divorce and was afraid of secret key logging software having been installed, so I wanted to give her peace of mind that after restoring just the selective data, that there would be no possibility of that being installed on her computer anymore. But yeah, it would have helped to have a copy of the cloned image on an external to recover the calendar from, if anything. Maybe this is not the correct way to think about it, but to clone every customers drive that is getting a reformat would probably add a week or two of time to every year I do business. Sure it's set and forget, but my turn around times are important to people also.

Over 6 years of doing this professionally for myself, I may have missed something else somewhat important perhaps one other time, but we obviously realize it's pretty hard to be 100%.

I bought Stellar Phoenix which was $100.. or the cost of her repair. One of the things it can do it find data from formatted drives.

I know it costs nothing, and even my elderly customers have all of their stuff synced from their Macs to their phones. Like I said, it's harder to avoid associating these things with some sort of account.

Anyways, about to remote back in and see if I can do anything with the data I've recovered. She just told me she's kept that Calendar as a journal to document every day of hers and her kids life, etc etc. She's no pro at syncing but can certainly take me on this guilt trip like no other

 

[Lifeisabeach]

The problem with cloning the drive.. I would totally have done that but she's going through a nasty divorce and was afraid of secret key logging software having been installed, so I wanted to give her peace of mind that after restoring just the selective data, that there would be no possibility of that being installed on her computer anymore. But yeah, it would have helped to have a copy of the cloned image on an external to recover the calendar from, if anything. Maybe this is not the correct way to think about it, but to clone every customers drive that is getting a reformat would probably add a week or two of time to every year I do business. Sure it's set and forget, but my turn around times are important to people also.

Well ultimately it's up to you to decide how to run your business. I'm sure this experience will be a lesson of some sort.

I bought Stellar Phoenix which was $100.. or the cost of her repair. One of the things it can do it find data from formatted drives.

The problem with that is that you didn't simply format the drive... you re-installed the OS afterward and migrated some user data. The reinstallation would have overwritten space that could have had recoverable data otherwise. Recovering data in such a scenario is not impossible, but requires a high level of expertise. Consumer-grade software won't do it.

BTW... I'm not under the impression that Stellar Phoenix is one of the better pieces of recovery software available. I just did a browse of the reviews on MacUpdate and while they have a handful of 5-star reviews, the half dozen 5-star reviewers I checked behind have ONLY reviewed that company's products. If it smells like a rat...

 

[chscag]

To echo member "Lifeisabeach" regarding Stella Phoenix, we've had several of their sales people spam our forums on and off. I personally would have chosen Data Rescue 4 instead of Stella Phoenix, but that's just me.

 

[indigit4l]

Sure, I'm aware her space where her data might still be could have been taken up by files returned to the drive.

As far as Stellar Phoenix goes, I've used the PC version and had luck with it. I find that there's not just a single data recovery software that does it all, but rather some can do better than others in certain jobs, etc. But I'll try the aforementioned one if I need to.

So I was able to use the "sort by file type" to show the results and have recovered about 3,800+ calendar events, or .ics files. I double clicked about 10 of them and about 1 or 2 out of 10 would be corrupt, but the others added her old data to the calendar. That's good news.

So the real question I had here, is what is the best way to get all of them in the calendar again. I tried copying all 3800+ of them to several events folders in some of the directories already present, but that didn't help. Worth a shot. I think I tried something else also, but in the end I ended up selecting all, and then just dragging all of them onto whatever page the calendar app was open to. I'd read that this is a way to import multiple events.

So while this is quicker than double clicking all 3,800+ files, it actually stops every time it hits a corrupted file and makes you hit enter. I can't tell yet that anything is getting added, but my thinking is that it is adding 5-10 files and then hits a corrupted one, needs to notify me, and then I hit enter and it continues until the next notification, which is literally me hitting enter every 1 second.

Can anyone suggest a better way, at least if this doesn't work? I will update you and thanks for any advice.

 

[pm-r]

I can't help other to say I've always had trouble "restoring" even small iCal or Calendar bits of data and it's a PITA.

But, holy smokes, I don't know anyone who would have even a fraction of 3,800+ calendar events unless they were old archives or now history events. That's one busy person.

 

[indigit4l]

Just an update...

Stellar Phoenix recovered the ical files, and by selecting all 3,800 of them and dragging them onto the Apple Calendar program it was able to restore all of her events. Some were corrupted I guess, but she just told me she has all of her stuff back in there now.

She had to hit "continue" (the enter button) maybe somewhere between 500-1000 times I'm guessing because every time it ran into a corrupted file it stopped to tell us. We had no idea if events were being added successfully until it was over, as the import blocked us being able to see the calendar.

Thanks for any and all replies people