Hari's Corner

Humour, comics, tech, law, software, reviews, essays, articles and HOWTOs intermingled with random philosophy now and then

Google calendar sync issue: events older than 30 days

Filed under: Tutorials and HOWTOs by Hari
Posted on Mon, Aug 25, 2014 at 20:14 IST (last updated: Mon, Aug 25, 2014 @ 20:20 IST)

I recently had a synchronization problem with my google calendar and my Android phone (Sony Xperia Ray). To solve the issue, I had deleted the calendar data from Settings->Applications->Manage Applications->Calendar Storage in my phone and then re-synced with the google account. Unfortunately, this meant that only events from the last 30 days displayed in the Android calendar though the events still existed on google. This behaviour/bug appears to be an issue across calendar apps in several Android devices and I finally found one solution that was not too convoluted and actually worked. I found this solution somewhere in a mailing list hidden among other proposed solutions (which didn't work), so I claim no credit for discovering this on my own. ;)

So this is for my own future reference and also for those who encounter the same issue and stumble upon this blog.

Here are the steps I followed

  1. First, I turned off syncing of my google account in Settings->Accounts and Sync and de-activating auto-sync on my phone.
  2. Then I cleared the calendar storage as above (Settings->Applications->Manage Applications->Calendar Storage and deleting the calendar data).
  3. Then from my web browser on my laptop, I logged into google calendar. Then from the sidebar, I clicked on My Calendars->Settings from the dropdown menu.
  4. From the settings, I exported the calendar to a file on my hard disk with the Export Calendars link. The downloaded copy is a ZIP file containing one file, the .ICS file. I extracted the ZIP file.
  5. Then I clicked on Import Calendar link and chose the uncompressed .ICS file. This option will simply overwrite your existing calendar with the same events (important: do not delete the calendar from google after exporting!)
  6. Finally I re-enabled auto syncing on my mobile and loaded the calendar app after connecting to the internet. Now I could see all the events from the calendar, regardless of date.

That was it. It appears that the syncing of the calendar looks for event modification date and by overwriting the google calendar with the same data, it sets the modification date to the present time.

I had actually come across this problem before and solved it back then. But I had forgotten to document it then. It's also important to keep regular backups of your calendar offline so that any synchronization issues can be solved by the above method. You don't want to accidentally delete events from your google calendar due to sync problems!

3 comment(s)

  1. Thanks! I have the problem, and now is fixed.

    Comment by henkyo (visitor) on Sat, Nov 15, 2014 @ 22:22 IST #
  2. Thank you for this! I tried everything I found when I Googled this issue and your fix was the only one that worked!

    Comment by Cat (visitor) on Fri, Oct 23, 2015 @ 20:02 IST #
  3. Glad to be of help :)

    Comment by Hari (blog owner) on Fri, Oct 23, 2015 @ 21:18 IST #

Comments closed

The blog owner has closed further commenting on this entry.