MacOS – How to recover ‘Reminders’ wiped out by Mountain Lion

data-recoverymacosreminders

I had a large list of reminders in OSX (Mountain Lion) sync'd to iCloud (i.e. my iPhone). While editing the list on the Mac and trying to delete (not 'checkbox') one work item, I accidentally deleted all the items in that list! Having a horrible delete user flow didn't help 🙁

I presume there is local copy of the reminders database on my Mac – which is then sync'd with iCloud. I would like to recover that copy (from Time Machine, backed regularly!) so I might be able to salvage the list of (important!) reminders. Does anyone know where that file is stored on the file system?

Any other suggestions to restoring my previous copy of reminders or undoing the delete? The obvious, undo doesn't work. Not sure why…

Best Answer

You should be able to find them if you're using Time Machine, but it might take a little digging. I'm not quite brave enough to use Mountain Lion so I can't say with certainty, but I believe the reminders are actually stored as calendar items, so you should be able to find them in the "Calendars" folder in the Library. You might want to use the Finder interface to look through the backups instead of Time Machine. The iCloud calendars should be stored as random number "caldav" folders. You'll have to look inside each folder until you find the reminders you're looking for. You can then drag the files into the Reminders app which will allow you to import into a list. Hope that helps.