Oops, You Did It Again! How To Undelete Events From Google Calendar

Oops, You Did It Again! How To Undelete Events From Google Calendar:
As the world gets more and more cloud-based and more and more online-oriented, we find ourselves relying more and more on luck. Hopefully the computer won’t crash in a critical moment; hopefully we won’t lose important and unrecoverable information that we never bothered to back up. Sounds familiar?
Most people do tend to backup important things such as their hard drive content or their phone’s SD card, but there’s one important thing most people don’t worry about: their calendar. Specifically, Google Calendar, which does have a tendency to delete and lose events at times, regardless of how careful you are.
If you delete an event on Google Calendar by accident, you have about 30 seconds to change your mind and hit “Undo”. After that, it’s gone forever. Not to speak of times when several events get deleted due to some glitch or another. So what do you do?

Google’s Say On The Matter

According to Google, deleted calendar events cannot be restored. They simply decide to not give the matter too much thought.

If you deleted some events by accident, and can’t remember what they were, or if some glitch deleted your entire monthly events, you have a serious problem. Most people are not up to accessing their calendar through an XML feed, as Google suggests, and even if they are, the events might not even be there. So is there a different solution?

Introducing Spanning Undelete

Spanning offers complete backup services for Google Apps customers, which covers e-mail, docs, calendars, and contacts. Aside from their paid product, Spanning also offers Spanning Undelete, which is completely free and is made for any Google Calendar user. Spanning Undelete accesses Google’s API and pulls your recently deleted events. Google Apps administrators can install it on the entire domain, but it can also be used by plain old Gmail users, like most of us. To begin, simply click the “Sign In” button.

Spanning Undelete will ask for various permissions the first time you sign in. It will first want some information from your Google account:

And will then ask for some permissions, such as managing your calendar and viewing your e-mail address.

After granting the app all the required permissions, you will reach the Spanning Undelete dashboard. On the left side, you’ll see all your different calendars, and on the right side is a list of all your recent undeletable events.

Undeleting Events

We all know what it’s like to delete something by mistake. That elusive Undo button Google offers is helpful, but it tends to disappear just when you realize you need to click it.

Spanning Undelete to the rescue! If you’ve deleted an event by mistake or something made you lose some events, open your Spanning Undelete dashboard and look for those inadvertently deleted events. The dashboard is easy to use: simply check all the events you wish to undelete, and click the big orange “Undelete” button.

If you have some deleted events but they’re not appearing in Spanning Undelete, try the dashboard’s refresh button. It’s important to use this refresh button and not the browser’s, which doesn’t do the trick.

When you choose to undelete an event, you can choose to prepend the text “[UNDELETED]” to it, and/or to resend invitations to the event’s guests.

And now it’s show time! Spanning Undelete will dazzle you with its orange progress bar, and work diligently on undeleting your events. The process is very quick.

And there you have it! Your event is back where it should be, and to prove it, it even says “[UNDELETED]” before its name. It’s like magic!

Final Note

Even if you can’t find use for it now, Spanning Undelete is definitely a keeper for a time of crisis. You never realize how important your calendar events are, until you lose them. You simply know there was something you had to do on Monday morning, but darn if you can remember what it was. So next time this happens to you, remember to look up Spanning Undelete, it may save you some heartache, embarrassment, and wasted time.
Know of similar life-saving tools? Or a brilliant way to backup your calendar? Share in the comments.