Removing duplicate events and alarms in iCal

As the developers of BusySync, we see a lot of legacy iCal calendars from customers that are filled with cruft.

These calendars might contain malformed data due to syncing with who-knows-what app/service/device in the past. The most common problems we see are duplicate alarms, duplicate events, and blank events. These bogus events and alarms can make iCal bloated and sluggish. What's worse, if you are sharing these bloated calendars with others via BusySync, iCal can become sluggish for the others too.

Today we're releasing iCal Cleaner, a free utility for cleaning up common problems in iCal. It's pretty straight forward: just launch iCal Cleaner, select the calendars you want to clean and the action you want to perform, and click Start. Then sit back and let iCal Cleaner do the rest.

Here's what iCal Cleaner can do:

• Delete Duplicate Events — This script will delete all duplicate Events and ToDos in iCal. Events with the same title and start time are considered duplicates. ToDos with the same title, completion date and due date are considered duplicates. The duplicates will be deleted, leaving the original event intact.
• Delete Blank Events — This script will delete all Events and ToDos in iCal that have no title.
• Delete All Alarms — This script will delete all Alarms attached to Events and ToDos in iCal. You can choose the type of Alarms to remove -- Message, Message with Sound, Email, Open File, or All Alarm types.
• Delete Duplicate Alarms — This script will delete duplicate alarms attached to Events and ToDos in iCal. It searches only for duplicate Message and Message with Sound Alarms. If an event has more than one of these alarms, the duplicates will be deleted, leaving only one alarm intact. Note: It does not take the alarm interval into consideration. So, if there are two message alarms (one set for 15 minutes before, and one set for 30 minutes before), one of the alarms will be deleted.
• Delete All Attendees — This script will delete all Attendees from Events in iCal.

You may want to give it a try. Who knows, you may have some cruft slowing down iCal that you didn't even know about. 

WARNING: iCal Cleaner will modify data in iCal. Please backup iCal before running iCal Cleaner.

You can download iCal Cleaner here.

Comments

[JAB70]

THANK YOU THANK YOU! Saved me hours of work

[Warren B.]

Wow. This saved me hours of work as well. I was really sick of having four instances of every meeting at work for the last 12 months on my Centro. :) Brilliant app.

[eve-isk]

Wow. This saved me hours of work as well. I was really sick of having four instances of every meeting at work for the last 12 months on my Centro. :) Brilliant app.

[cheapest mortal gold]

Thank you,thank you!Saved me hours of work

[qings blog]

Very beautifully defined. Thanks a lot for the share. Good post.

[BeantownMac]

This is SO helpful - thank you for writing this app!

[buy terracotta warriors]

This saved me hours of work as well.

[D]

most excellent!

[Eric]

You are champions. Saved me a ton of time.

[Oscar]

Indeed! This is a fantastic tool! :D

[John]

Works like a charm, fast and easy. Misses a few dupes, but removed scores more. THANK YOU!!!

[Jason]

You just saved me at least 5 hours of work! I had imported another calendar and it added duplicate alarms to everything! Great app!

[Mike Benedetto]

Thank you so much! I already couldn't tolerate being notified of birthdays of people I haven't seen in years, but getting the alert three, four, five times made me a little nuts.

[Matt]

Thanks so much. I just wish there was an added dialog after the search was finished that showed what was getting deleted. Either that or a log file of some kind.