ISync deleted a calendar from iCal

Question

I'm very new to the Mac world. My PC died at Thanksgiving and I'm still getting used to my new iMac. I am using iSync to sync between my new iMac and my very old Handspring Visor Prism. Things are going remarkably well except now that I have moved all my (11 years worth) calendar appts/events to the iMac, I'd like to stop storing and syncing them to the Visor, since I'm worried that it will fail if it gets too full.
My bright idea was to create a separate calendar with all events from 97-08 and then use the "home" calendar from 2009 going forward. So on my next sync, I only checked "Home" to sync so that there would be less on my Visor. Doing this, iSync successfully synchronized the Home calendar (w/my newer events), but deleted my "old" calendar from iCal. I don't understand why that happened. I thought unselecting a calendar in iSync would do the same thing as the "Do Nothing" option in HotSync (literally, don't sync, but also, don't delete!).
Is there any way to keep some events in an iCal calendar but not on your handheld device?
Thanks,
Tracy

Answer 1

The deletion of your unchecked iCal calendar would or should have only occurred if you first deleted the the matching calendar on your Palm device prior to the next synchronization event, and did not opt to reset the framework as described below. The appropriate 'reaction' of the Sync Services framework on your machine is to delete matching calendar event and task information in your truth database, and distribution those deletion changes to all other synchronized applications, devices and servers.
If you had simply unchecked the calendar in your drop-down iSync device configuration pane then reset the framework using the option in the iSync Preferences… dialog to do so and subsequently overwritten the contents of your Palm device—as opposed to merging data with it—your calendar would have remained in iCal but matching data would have been removed from the Palm device.
Whenever you seek to make a substantial change such as you did, you should back up your iCal and Address Book records using the built-in options in each application to do so, BEFORE you next execute a synchronization event. In that way, it's easy to 'recover' data when an unexpected result occurs.