Learn how to stop Apple’s built-in Calendar app from deleting old events and restore past appointments if they’re missing from the app.
The symptoms are pretty obvious. Whether you use the built-in Calendar application or a third-party alternative, you eventually realize that all your events older than three months are suddenly gone, except for recurring events like birthdays and holidays. Scary! Relax, neither iOS nor the Calendar app are deleting your events on a whim. Rather, they’ve stopped syncing so iOS removes them after a certain cut-off period instead of leaving them on the device.
Luckily, that doesn’t mean your removed events are permanently gone; they’re still there, only hidden. And if you use iCloud, they’re safe and sound on Apple’s servers. I don’t use Google for my calendar needs, but I assume it’s the same thing regardless of the service.
Restore past calendar events on iPhone
Follow these steps to restore removed events and stop iOS from deleting your old calendar events.
- Open the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad, scroll to the bottom and choose Apps.
- Select Calendars from this list of installed applications.
- Tap Sync.
- By default, events are synced one month back, but you can change this by choosing from Events 3 Months Back, Events 6 Months Back, or All Events.
And that’s it! Depending on the selected timeframe, your old, missing events will show up again in the Calendar app. To always keep all calendar events on your device, choose the All Events option.
Interestingly, the Mac’s Calendar app doesn’t behave this way. On macOS, all your events are synced and there’s no option to change the sync period. If you use iCloud to store your calendar events, you can see all your past events by visiting iCloud.com and logging in using your Apple account email address and password.
So there you have it. If you thought the calendar app was automatically deleting your past appointments for no apparent reason, I hope this will reassure you.
Other Calendar tips for you: