Yesterday, at approximately 11:37 am, my entire calendar was just somehow deleted.  Every, single appointment just.went.poof.

 After numerous conversations with multiple kinds of tech support, and much wailing and gnashing of teeth, I have learned that there is nothing to be done except recreate my calendar.  God help me – why did I ever switch from paper?!  

I’m the kind of person who puts everything, including my to-do’s, in my calendar as appointments – it keeps me honest about time management. So this was a total disaster. I felt lost at sea. And before you jump to the “why didn’t you have a back-up of your files” question, know that I’m fairly anal-retentive about backing up! A few years ago I had a hard drive fail and learned the hard way that you can’t trust your computer as a storage device. In fact, I’m so anal about it that I store all of my files virtually, via a service called Dropbox.com (I highly recommend it – not only do I always have the peace of mind that my files are backed up, but I can also access them from wherever I am, on any computer).

So, I had backups of my contacts and all of my email already. And at 11:35 I decided it would be a good idea to back up my calendar as well. I wanted the master-calendar to sync with all of my devices (iPhone, computer, etc). so I chose a little service called Me.com, which promises to do just that. Sort of like Dropbox, but for calendars. Sadly, that’s where my troubles began. I must have inadvertently pressed the wrong button – and the blank calendar on Me.com over-wrote the calendar on my desktop.

The lesson: if you are going to sync your calendar with any device, virtual or physical, be sure to select MERGE appointments.

That way no appointment will be deleted. And even if you have to clean up duplicates, you won’t be left like I was, trying to recreate everything from scratch.

OR – you could just go back to paper. If I honestly tallied up all of the hours I lost (and gray hairs I gained) from yesterday’s debacle, I am sure that it wiped out (and then some) any efficiencies I gained from going digital. I’m going to do both.

On the positive side, this disaster prompted me to send an email blast to my contacts asking them to help me rebuild my calendar and I’ve gotten to say a virtual hello to hundreds of people I haven’t spoken to in far too long. There’s always a silver lining, right?