How do I delete a prior month(s) or entire year(s) in iCal on my iMac (using version 4.0.4 (1395.7)? Want to delete all months in 2009

Question

I checked what was previous asked in deleting months from iCal; however, that question pertained to removing events from a month and not necessarily deleting the entire month.  I have three years of calendars (January - December x three) in my iCal and want to delete all months for 2009 and 2010; however, I can't seem to find a way to delete.  I checked preferences/advanced under iCal but no mention of deleting previous months/years.

Answer 1

Greetings Judith,
Before making any attempts at deleting calendar data, backup what you have just in case:
Click on each calendar on the left hand side of iCal one at a time highlighting it's name and then going to File Export > Export and saving the resulting calendar file to a logical location for safekeeping.
iCal has an automated function located in iCal > Preferences > Advanced > Delete events "X" days after they have passed.  By typing in a value for days you can tell iCal to delete all events before that time frame.
Example:
Today is 4-16-2012.
If I wanted to delete all events prior to 1 year ago (4-16-2011) I would type in "365" for the number of days.
Once you type in the number of days you want kept in iCal, close the preferences and then quit iCal.
Re-open iCal and check to see if the events are gone.  If not you may want to leave it open for several minutes and then quit again.
Once the events are removed go back to  iCal > Preferences > Advanced > Delete events "X" days after they have passed and make sure the check mark is removed to prevent future deletion.
Hope that helps.