When you start fresh with your calendars on an iPhone, chances are you’ll sync them to your iCloud account on all your devices. This is exactly what the default configuration allows you, and it takes up so little space in the cloud that you don’t have to worry about filling anything, even if you keep the base count of 5 Go.
But it is possible that you are part of a very common case: that of having several calendars and not even knowing in which service you are creating your new events. You know you’ve set up a Google Calendar, you know you have iCloud…but you can’t even guess where each of your calendars is. Do not panic: we will unify these calendars in iCloud to avoid these confusions.
How to Stop Dependent on Various Services for Your Calendars and Only Depend on iCloud
What I often see in my conversations with customers is an iPhone that’s been set up with a Google account, usually so I can check email from the Mail app. probably unintentionally, this user has also enabled syncing of Google calendars. These are added to the Calendar application, they are mixed with those of iCloud and end up making it so that the user does not know which service each of these calendars is in. And where I say Google, I can also say Outlook/Hotmail.
Checking if this is your case is simple: enter the Calendar application on your iPhone and click on Calendars, at the bottom of the screen:
If what you see in the image above is similar to what you see on your screen, then you have this “mix” of calendars between different clouds. Our objective: turn off these additional services in iCloud and (if you need to) move events from calendars to iCloud. Let’s go for the latter before anything else.
If the events you have in other calendars are few, you can simply switch them to an iCloud calendar by tapping on it and changing the “Calendar” field:
If you have a lot of events in this calendar and you don’t want to do it by hand, you can resort to your Mac so you can export this calendar and import all your events back into an iCloud calendar. You can do this from the Calendar application itself, by selecting the calendar you want and clicking on the ‘File’ menu and ‘Export’:
The calendar will be exported to an .ICS file, in the folder where you chose to save it:
Now you can simply drag and drop this calendar into one of the iCloud calendars (and if you want to a new calendar, you can create it from the “File” menu – “New calendar”):
All that remains is to disable the synchronization of additional calendars and leave only those from iCloud. To do this, we will go to Settings, ‘Calendar’ section and then to ‘Accounts’:
There we will select the account from which we want to deactivate the calendar and we will do exactly that in its options:
Having all the calendars in the same service simplifies calendar management and saves us a lot of confusion, especially if we don’t know much about the iPhone yet. Also, in iCloud Calendars, you will never lose data since everything is synchronized and stored in the cloud whatever happens to your devices.
In Applesphere | As hard as I try to use task apps, I can’t get away from Calendar on my Mac, iPhone, and iPad
