Restore deleted Calendar?

[Fuzzy Logic]

I have chemo brain right now, and I accidentally deleted my Calendar. Am I hooped?

Thanks.

[Fuzzy Logic]

Shouldn't this have been a quick Yes/No answer from the help desk? (who I emailed directly two days ago) Haven't heard from Fastmail except a do-not-reply email that said the query needed clarification. Don't know what to think.

[krimlin]

I guess, that means: "There is no calendar recoverty option like there is one for emails. However, one of the developers will eventually try to recover your data from one of the backups. But since this isn't part of the daily routine, it could take some time until someone replies."

[BritTim]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy Logic

Shouldn't this have been a quick Yes/No answer from the help desk? (who I emailed directly two days ago) Haven't heard from Fastmail except a do-not-reply email that said the query needed clarification. Don't know what to think.

It probably meant that they needed more detail before they could attempt to recover the calendar for you. As krimlin indicated, there is no DIY recovery possible. Actually, I think it would be reasonable for them to charge you for recovery.

[gardenweed]

I guess this also raises the question as to how one can backup existing calendars.

Is it possible?

[OLee]

Originally Posted by gardenweed

I guess this also raises the question as to how one can backup existing calendars.

Is it possible?

Calendar Backup

Unless someone has a better way, I would say you can backup your FastMail calendars by going into the FastMail main menu and selecting Import/Export. Then go to the Export section at the bottom of the window and select your calendar. Then click Download. Your calendar should download into a file which is in iCal format. Your current calendar should be contained in this file and you should keep this file in a safe and secure location.

Should your current FastMail Calendar somehow get trashed, you can go back into the Import/Export area of FastMail and import your saved iCal file back into FastMail.

If you have a lot of important events and such in your calendar and you make a lot of changes, you may want to download a backup file more often than if you rarely make changes to your calendar.


Contacts/Address Book Backup

You should also be able to use this method to backup your FastMail contacts. Although I do have a question about which format to use when exporting contact files.

FastMail has so many different export format choices that I'm not sure which would be the best one to use when or if I wanted to export a contact file as backup and use it only to import it back into FastMail, if I ever needed to?

Which format will work best when importing back into FastMail should my regular contacts somehow become trashed and need to be replaced with a backup? Does anyone have any experience or knowledge of this? Thanks.

[gardenweed]

Originally Posted by OLee

Calendar Backup

..... I would say you can backup your FastMail calendars by going into the FastMail main menu and selecting Import/Export. Then go to the Export section at the bottom of the window and select your calendar. Then click Download. Your calendar should download into a file which is in iCal format. ..

....

Thanks OLee - I didn't know this import/export menu existed for Calendar & Contacts

[Fuzzy Logic]

I'd gladly stump up if a Fastmail tech was able to restore the deleted Calendar. I guess I'll wait to hear. And yes, I should have backed it up by exporting it, but I'm not firing on all cylinders these days.

[gardenweed]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy Logic

... And yes, I should have backed it up by exporting it, but I'm not firing on all cylinders these days.

Don't kick yourself

The FM Calendar backup process is manual. Who actually goes to the trouble of using it regularly.

All my other backup processes are automated. So having to use a manual process is a bit 1980's.

What would be nice is to be able to restore from the FM "cloud" - In a similar way that FM currently provides for restoring deleted emails.

[rusl]

Would be great if Fastmail took snapshots of your contacts and calendar on a daily basis and allowed you to roll back to a previous state. It's a bit too easy to accidentally delete contacts and calendar entries on a touch-screen phone and then have no way to restore what was lost. Of course everyone should synch their contacts, email, and calendar to their computer and have daily automated backups...

[Fuzzy Logic]

Happy to report that Bron at FastMail was able to restore 4 of my deleted calendars. What a relief! Everything is hunky dory now and the right calendar is now backed up just in case my brain goes walkabout again.

I'm a FastMail lifer now.

[BritTim]

Happy to hear Fastmail were able to sort you out. Over the years, I have found Fastmail generally, and Bron in particular, very responsive when a customer has a major problem, though it may take a while.

[brong]

I'm on holiday over Easter, so don't break anything while I'm gone

[brong]

Originally Posted by rusl

Would be great if Fastmail took snapshots of your contacts and calendar on a daily basis and allowed you to roll back to a previous state. It's a bit too easy to accidentally delete contacts and calendar entries on a touch-screen phone and then have no way to restore what was lost. Of course everyone should synch their contacts, email, and calendar to their computer and have daily automated backups...

I have a plan which involves making it easier to just switch on a "see deleted" view. It's a bit tricky with calendar if you edit an event and want to revert to an earlier version of the same event - but even with that, the most difficult bit is actually the user interface. We still have the data for at least a week...

Bron.