All iCal events disappeared beyond 90 days ago

Question

I just noticed that all of my events—except for repeating ones—have disappeared from my iCal calendar, from August 28th backwards. In other words, I have everything still for the past 3 months, just the stuff before that is gone.
Since I've got MobileMe and an iPhone, I checked those, too, and same deal: everything except repeating events (birthdays, weekly and monthly custom stuff) is gone.
I've no idea what happened. I don't have any iCal setting set to delete past events.
Since I have Time Capsule set up, I'm wondering if there's a way to go back and grab the iCal calendar before all events and appointments got deleted. I'm positive it's in TC, just don't know how to get it, and yet not erase the stuff that's been added since.
Any ideas?

Answer 1

Mike, Thanks for posting. I'd done a search for this issue and nothing came up, so I appreciate you linking back to that thread.
For anyone following this, that other long thread doesn't have any solutions other than Mike's post. So I'll copy his solution here:
"I have got my old calendar data back into MobileMe without downgrading by:
1.Restore ~/Library/Calendars from Time Machine (use "replace" option). This adds all the events Including (all the earlier ones) into "on my mac" calendars. So if you have both the "MobileMe" and the "On my Mac" calendars ticked then the recent events are duplicated. You could stop here and leave the "on my mac" ones unticked unless you wanted to see the history. I went on to......
2.Export each calendar from "on my mac", and import each to the corresponding MobileMe calendar.
3.Manually remove the duplicates for recent events."
I'll add my own two cents: I wasn't sure how far back to go in Time Machine, because I completely forgot which day (or month) I'd upgraded the MobileMe Calendar. In fact, I tried about 4 dates, and then checking to see if the old calendar (on my mac) was back. Each time, it wasn't, so I kept going further back in Time Machine (finally until August 1, 2010). Weirdly, it still wasn't back.
But then I noticed an interesting file inside of (home)/Library/Calendars, called Cache. There were actually a couple of them. I wondered if it acted similar to Safari's cache, in that it kept things just like they were an hour ago. So, I deleted all of the cache files, and boom, all of the events were back.
Strangely, all of the events and to-dos I'd added since August were also still in the calendar. I've no idea how it did that, since I thought I completely replaced the contents of the Library/Calendar folder.
Some other tips:
1. before doing anything, backup your Calendar (File: Export: iCal Archive) just in case you need to redo the whole thing.
2. Back up the current Library/Calendar folder. Probably the same thing as doing the above Archive, but I'm not that smart so I did this as well.
3. Sign out of Mobile Me (System Prefs: MobileMe: Account: Sign Out), so that MM doesn't try to overwrite your good work.
4. Quit iCal before working with Time Machine.
5. Before working with Time Machine, I took screen shots of each month (in Month View) for the last few months. This was in case the backup would delete all of the stuff I'd added since the date I was backing up from. As noted above for reasons I can't figure out, the old Calendar kept all my new stuff from the last few months, so I didn't end up needing the screen shots. Still, I'd suggest doing it!
As Mike noted, there were some duplicates. I couldn't see any pattern to the dupes, but they were mainly birthdays, repeating tasks, and a few multi-day events. Not a big deal.