ARGH calendar sync is horrible (wont sync back more than 2 months)

[fyuta]

I am almost ready to throw my android device out of a car window at 75 mph.

I cannot believe for such an advanced device, I am still struggling after one year to find a reliable way to sync my google calendar and my htc evo.

I have been using the google calendar widget (not perfect, but functional WHEN IT WORKS). My latest problem is trying to sync more than 60 days prior to current date. For some reason this stopped working after I was forced to clear all the data on my device.

Does anyone know how I can make appointments that appear on my google calendar appear on my device?

 

[Clementine_3]

There are a lot of calendar apps that will allow full sync, I bought Calengoo and love it. It pulls (and is easily searchable) my entire calendar and I really like the look. Also look at Jorte, I believe that is (or has) a free app.

 

[fyuta]

Tried Jorte and it too was limited to 2 months worth of back appointments (plus the view options were not as nice as the google calendar widget). It appears this is not related to the google calendar widget but more a problem with the Android OS. I will check the other program to mentioned to see if that resolves the problem

 

[fyuta]

just paid the $5.99 for calengoo and agree that it is much better than Jorte or the standard google calendar widget, but the 60 day limit still applies.

Anyone else venture a guess (and saying that Android sucks doesnt count )

Edit
I just sent an email to calengoo tech support and will post my findings. Since this seems to be a known problem for other users, I hope that my research might help find the resolution so others can avoid my pain.

 

[wayrad]

If you go into the old Google Calendar appointments on the desktop and make a minor edit (I just added an asterisk to mine when I had a similar problem), do they sync to the phone then?

 

[funpig]

i use calengoo which will sync all historical events (I go back about 10 years with my calendar).

If you are too cheap to spend the money on calengo, here is an alternative work around. Go to your date & time settings of your android and uncheck automatic. Then reset the date to before the first event you want to sync up (eg. Jan 1 2000 if you want go back 11 years). Do a regular sync. It will take about 10 minutes. All of your old events will be synced to your phone. Then go to your date and time settings and reset back to automatic. All of the synced up events will stay there and surprisingly if you add new events more than 2 months old they still sync up.

I do prefer calengoo. All the syncs are much faster and of course there are alot of very good features with calengoo. I think one of the reason Android puts in a 2 month limit is because the syncs are too slow if you sync a large database.

 

[fyuta]

I already have Calengoo and that did not fix the problem. The problem exists with ALL calendar programs I have used including the standard Android calendar, calengoo, and Jorte.

As suggested by WayRad, I did make a change one calendar entry from early June and wala! it appeared on my android calendar!

Of course this is not a practical solution as I would need to change hundreds of entries to get them to display in my android calendar.

Now that we have another piece of the puzzle, does anyone know what the problem is and what a practical solution might be?

ps. google bugs are really starting to bug the heck out of me. I still cannot comprehend how so many sync problems can exist with this stupid OS. I had ZERO problems syncing my old palm pilot in the mid 90's. In my opinion, syncing effectively is much less likely today than in the good old days of crappy Windows 3.1

 

[fyuta]

Since all my calendar entries appear in the google calendar when I view it with a web browser, it is evident the problem is mired in the sync settings for the gmail account. I have considered deleting the gmail connection, but to do so would require setting the device back to factory settings and losing all apps, and data that relate to apps. This is not at all an appealing process.


Again, this issue underscores googles lack of competency with OS development, although they are still better than Microslop. Thank god I made the switch to a Mac last year. This issue is really making me give serious consideration to switching to an iPhone. I had another rediculous problem that I just figured out where at 3AM every morning my phone would start playing a song. Seems the gmail app decided to pick a song at random and play it whenever it downloaded email (every morning at 3AM). This android OS really seems tossed together without much coordination or support. They must have hired their developers from MS

 

[TeresaTT]

Did you try this in Calengoo?

Direct sync with Google Calendar
The advantage is that you can keep a copy of all your events on your phone this way. It can download all your past and future events and the search function will search in all of them. Additionally you can assign icons to your events. CalenGoo can automatically sync in configurable intervals and when you connect to a Wi-Fi network. Additionally you can trigger the sync using the

 

[Deleted User]

This doesn't seem to be a universal problem as my calendar syncs fine and shows all my historic data.

 

[funpig]

I already have Calengoo and that did not fix the problem. The problem exists with ALL calendar programs I have used including the standard Android calendar, calengoo, and Jorte.

You need to understand how Calengoo works.

First of all, you need a google account to sync. Go to calengoo settings and click accounts. There should be an "Android" account; you need to disable this and add your gmail account eg. your-name@gmail.com. And then do a sync. The "android" account is the same calendar as what you see on your android calendar eg 2 months of syncing. The gmail account will sync up with google via calengoo and will sync up all your history. If you enable both accounts, Calengoo will show double entries for at least 2 months and will probably freak you out. Easy fix, just disable one of them ie. Android.

 

[fyuta]

This doesn't seem to be a universal problem as my calendar syncs fine and shows all my historic data.

not universal for me either. This problem has only occurred for me a couple times previous, but a wiping clean of data on the google calendar and the android device and re-syncing between entourage and google calendar (using spanning sync) has fixed it. Not this time unfortunately. I have read other reports when doing web searches for a solution of others than have experienced the problem of not being able to sync items older than 60 days, but in my research, I have not found a solution.

 

[fyuta]

Did you try this in Calengoo?

Direct sync with Google Calendar
The advantage is that you can keep a copy of all your events on your phone this way. It can download all your past and future events and the search function will search in all of them. Additionally you can assign icons to your events. CalenGoo can automatically sync in configurable intervals and when you connect to a Wi-Fi network. Additionally you can trigger the sync using the

 

[fyuta]

You need to understand how Calengoo works.

First of all, you need a google account to sync. Go to calengoo settings and click accounts. There should be an "Android" account; you need to disable this and add your gmail account eg. your-name@gmail.com. And then do a sync. The "android" account is the same calendar as what you see on your android calendar eg 2 months of syncing. The gmail account will sync up with google via calengoo and will sync up all your history. If you enable both accounts, Calengoo will show double entries for at least 2 months and will probably freak you out. Easy fix, just disable one of them ie. Android.

I love you too funpig, but my heart already belongs to Theresa

 

[fyuta]

While I have solved my problem, it is still pretty evident that the sync between Googles calendar and the Android calendar has a fundamental bug. This is inexcusable to me. I mean for God's sake, this was supposed to be a core competency of this mobile OS platform.

2 thumbs down for google (even though I love their search engine)

 

[funpig]

This doesn't seem to be a universal problem as my calendar syncs fine and shows all my historic data.

Which phone and version of Android are you running? The 2 month syncing limit is a known Android issue:

Issue 3672 - android - Calendar app won't sync events older than 1 month - Android - An Open Handset Alliance Project - Google Project Hosting


So far I have only come across two ways to deal with this:

1. temporarily change the date on your phone to fool it into syncing back more than 2 months (and then change back to present date).

2. calengoo

Maybe some of the other third party calendar apps have developed a workaround, but it has been more than 7 months since I stopped testing calendar apps and settled on calengoo.

 

[fyuta]

after several hours wasted on this idiotic problem, I can now go back to my day job.

 

[fyuta]

phone is HTC Evo 4G

Solution #1 is not very practical, but solution #2 is. Buying Calengoo for only $6 means I dont have to mess with this ridiculous problem any more. Thanks for tipping me off to solution #1. Maybe if I get bored and masochistic some day, I will give it a try.

Love you all

Which phone and version of Android are you running? The 2 month syncing limit is a known Android issue:

Issue 3672 - android - Calendar app won't sync events older than 1 month - Android - An Open Handset Alliance Project - Google Project Hosting


So far I have only come across two ways to deal with this:

1. temporarily change the date on your phone to fool it into syncing back more than 2 months (and then change back to present date).

2. calengoo

Maybe some of the other third party calendar apps have developed a workaround, but it has been more than 7 months since I stopped testing calendar apps and settled on calengoo.

 

[funpig]

While I have solved my problem, it is still pretty evident that the sync between Googles calendar and the Android calendar has a fundamental bug. This is inexcusable to me. I mean for God's sake, this was supposed to be a core competency of this mobile OS platform.

2 thumbs down for google (even though I love their search engine)

I am glad you got it working. You will find that Calengoo has a lot of excellent features.

I was a 10 year Palm OS and Pimlico DateBk5 user and it took several months for me to find a calendar app which was comparable to my old Palm calendar system. Google/Android has some idiosyncracies, but so did Palm. One just has to learn how to adapt.

 

[funpig]

Solution #1 is not very practical, but solution #2 is. Buying Calengoo for only $6 means I dont have to mess with this ridiculous problem any more. Thanks for tipping me off to solution #1. Maybe if I get bored and masochistic some day, I will give it a try.

Love you all

The funny thing is that you only need to do the backdating trick once to get it to sync all the historical data. So it is not all that difficult to do. After you reset the date back to auto, it continues to sync new events/changes as you go forward (at least it did for me). But the advantage of Calengoo is that the Calengoo sync times going forward are way faster than the Android sync times (eg 10-15 seconds compared to 3 -6 minutes each time).

 

[Grateful Diver]

Temporarily setting back current date: Brialliant idea, Funpig! I so hoped it would work. But no luck on my Droid X. Nothing later than 60 days. I tried setting the time back 10 years, 5 years, 1 year. No dice. Time to try Calengoo. BTW, the Google FAQ addressing the issue of historic events states that if one does a Droid Calendar Storage reset and then resyncs, only events in the past 30 days will appear. Blah!