How To Back Up Your Google Calendar

Is this you? Do you, like me, have an Android phone and use Gmail for all your email, Google Calendar for all of your events and tasks, all because it offers such easy synching and a nice online access point you can take anywhere? You are not alone. More importantly, you are not immune to the occasional Google snafu that might lock you out of your mail or lock down your calendar once in a while.

I'll be writing a separate post about backing up your social data and your Gmail, but today let's talk about backing up your Google Calendar. There are a variety of ways to do this, from the completely manual to the fully automated.

First, the completely manual method:

1. Head over to your Calendar and click "Settings" in the upper right of the screen

2. Choose "Calendar Settings" from the drop down menu

3. Click the "Calendars" tab on the control panel page that opens

4. Under "My Calendars" click on the blue link for the one you want to back up (you will have to do this and the following steps for each calendar using the manual method)

5. Scroll down the page until you see the green ICAL button next to the words Private Address (note: don't share this link with anyone other than yourself)

6. Right click on the green ICAL button

7. Select "Copy Link" or "Save Link As" (this wording depends on your browser and operating system)

8. Save the file onto your hard drive. It will show up there as "Basic.ics" and can be imported back into Google Calendar, iCal or another calendar program using the .ics protocol if you should get locked out of your Google fortress.

9. Repeat daily for all calendars you want to save

Now, a few automated options for you:

You can automate the back up with a free file downloader program, if you are a PC. There is a nice tutorial on using FDM here, as well as a link to download the file.

Automate your calendar backup (and a bunch of other backups I'll cover in the next article) using Backupify. It's incredibly easy to use, and it keeps your stuff in one handy place for you.

Automate your calendar backup using BackUpGoo, a simple desktop app designed to save all of your Google stuff in one place on your hard drive.

There are a few other methods out there, but these should get you started. One last point to remember: don't back it up to just one hard drive. Those can get corrupted as well. Make sure you duplicate your backups to other drives or to the cloud. Always.