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Sync your iCal events without using external servers Apps
I wanted to find a way to Sync my iCal events with all my computers without having to pay for .Mac. I found a very easy to use and cheep ($16.95) shareware application called iSynCal.

As long as you can connect to a computer via network (sharing), you can sync the iCal to and from the computer you are on. Fast and easy. Hope someone else can make use of this, I know I have (and I'm not affiliated with the company in any way).

[robg adds: I haven't tried this one, and I thought we had posted another method of accomplishing iCal synchronization, but I can't find it in the database ... so I'm listing this one for completeness' sake.]
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Sync your iCal events without using external servers
Authored by: amacaulay on Jul 29, '03 12:00:29PM

This hint may be what Rob was thinking of. You can use MacOS X's built in Apache and enable the WebDav module so users can Publish and Subscribe from within iCal itself.

Then you can share calendars rather than sync them. I have a WebDav server working for this and it does the job well without any attention. I subscribe to my partner's seemingly random shift patterns at work and can plan my days or joint engagements around them. I publish our joint engagements and my partner doesn't book extra work at the same time. With iSync synching all my calendars with my Sony Clie, I'm quite organised for the first time in my life.

The two mechanisms solve very different problems. Publish/Subscribe lets many users share event data; Synching lets one user have their data correct on many devices.

Which brings me to say that there are a number of things I don't like about iSynCal. Don't get my attitude wrong: Sync software is very hard to get right and I'm not about to volunteer to write something better (hmmm - my first Cocoa app?) But the procedure for using iSynCal seems like it has some loose floorboards just waiting to trip you up one day - as do many other Sync programs. And I rely on the accuracy of my diary too much to risk messing it up.

‹Doom & Gloom on›

I don't enable file sharing willy-nilly. I'm a paranoid security bloke. File shares can act as a dormant nesting ground for trojans and viruses of any OS that has access to them. Looking at the iSynCal example in the online docs, file sharing needs to be enabled on all the machines except one, including in this case a work machine (does your sysadmin allow random file sharing in his network?) To access calendars, you have to mount all the remote Home directories, using appropriate user names and passwords. The docs actually include a section on synching with someone else's calendars, requiring you to have read and write access to their iCal files. The docs go on to show you how you must give your group read access to your ~?Library? , and read/write access to ~?Library?Calendars? and all contents.

iCal must be closed on all computers for iSynCal to work. Oops - I left it running when I left work Friday night. Where was my Monday morning client meeting being held again?

Look at the method for deleting events. If I delete an event at work, iCal has no journalling, iSynCal has no record of past state and so when I sync my home and work machines, the event is resurrected at work rather than deleted at home.

I believe that it is actually impossible to properly sync any dataset without some metadata. Where iSync succeeds is by remembering the state of all datasets at the last sync for backward comparison. Where it's no good for many people is in its business model, of course.

‹Doom & Gloom off›

If you need to synchronise calendars, either for one user or for many, I don't know of any other way off the top of my head, so this software fills a gap. It does what many two-way sync programs do for other types of data. Do, as always, keep good backups.



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Sync your iCal events without using external servers
Authored by: shneusk on Dec 01, '03 03:09:12PM

I found that icalsync didn't quite work properly (Jaguar) so I just made a cron job to upload my calendar files to my webserver every 2 hours. I setup an ftp user just for this task so I don't have to get paranoid about saved login and password info.



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