I woke up to find that every calendar entry had vanished from my iPhone 13. My calendar contains years of important information, so this is a major problem. I've already erased the phone, restored it from a backup, checked my synced accounts, and tried the usual recovery steps, but nothing has brought the events back. They also aren't showing up on iCloud.com or on my other devices. Is there anything else I can try to recover them?
3 Answers
First check iCloud.com to see whether the events still exist there. On the phone, go to Settings > Calendar > Accounts and make sure the relevant accounts are present and signed in. Also confirm the calendars are enabled in the Calendar app and that Calendar syncing is turned on under your iCloud settings. If the events are still visible online, switching calendar sync off and back on can force a fresh sync.
There’s an iCloud recovery option for restoring calendars and events from an earlier archive. It’s worth checking whether an older version is available, although the recovery choices may be limited.
I tried the recovery tool, but the only available version was from the day I noticed the problem. There weren’t any earlier archives to restore.
A device backup may not contain calendars that were being synced through iCloud, Google Calendar, or another online account. If an account password changed or the account was removed from the phone, the calendar could disappear until you sign in again. Unfortunately, if the events are gone from the service itself and there’s no older archive, an iPhone backup usually can’t restore them.
That explains why restoring the phone didn’t help. I haven’t intentionally changed accounts or passwords, and I’m still trying to understand how to protect calendar entries from this happening again.
I checked all of those settings and tried refreshing the sync, but the events aren’t on iCloud.com or any of my other devices, so it looks like they disappeared everywhere.