Sync only goes back 30 days

For me, the greater problem is the disappearance of entries prior to mid-August, which no-one else has commented on so maybe it's unique to me. I can't find any setting anywhere to adjust the number of days or months/years for syncing back-entries - is there such a setting? The whole year exist in the online stake calendar, but events prior to 23 Aug 2012 won't sync to my computers.

[Moderator note: This topic used to be part of this post in a separate thread.]

marshallcl wrote:For me, the greater problem is the disappearance of entries prior to mid-August, which no-one else has commented on so maybe it's unique to me. I can't find any setting anywhere to adjust the number of days or months/years for syncing back-entries - is there such a setting? The whole year exist in the online stake calendar, but events prior to 23 Aug 2012 won't sync to my computers.

I see the same problem - no more entries before about the 23rd or 24th of August. I believe I've set things so it will look back 6 months, but there is nothing there more than 30-days back. And it's across my devices (iPhone, iPad and MBP iCal).

When the one-hour connection limit was set did the Church also set a 30-day limit on previous calendar entries? If so, I agree that this would be hard to work with since I often look back at events to determine dates, etc. The default should be a year.

boliviakid wrote:When the one-hour connection limit was set did the Church also set a 30-day limit on previous calendar entries? If so, I agree that this would be hard to work with since I often look back at events to determine dates, etc. The default should be a year.

I don't know exactly when it started, but I have examined the iCal feed from the sync and indeed the feed only contains events going back 30 days. Obviously there has to be a cutoff -- you don't want to include all events since the dawn of time (okay, that's an exaggeration, since the new Calendar has only existed a few years, but you get the point). The more data that is included, the longer it takes to sync and the greater the strain on Church servers.

For me personally, I have no problem with the 30 day limit. I am constantly looking forward, but rarely looking back. I can see why you might want more than 30 days, but a full year seems overly generous. In any case, the developers need to strike the right balance between usability and performance -- it's a tricky problem.

I work at a major software/hardware company and am responsible for the customer support web site, so I totally understand the fine balance that is sometimes needed between performance and usability. I also know that customer/user feedback is very important, and for me, in my calling (again just one voice), I do have to look back and going from "the dawn of time" to 30-days was a significant leap.

My feedback is, for me, that's too much. My comment is that the pendulum went a bit too far to the performance side at the expense of usability, both in the case of the connection limit being set to an hour, and the history being cut to 30-days. Both changes at once created some confusion and a bit of frustration. (And again, the connection limit being set to one hour is more than generous if all you're doing is checking for updates from a single point - most of the time the stake calendar only changes on a weekly basis so you would think setting the limit to once an hour would be just fine. However, it's the side effect of having multiple devices, getting them subscribed and not stepping on each other within the constraints of the hourly access limitation that's the problem, not the frequency of only checking for updates every hour. Most non-technical iPhone/iPad users are not going to understand how to setup their devices to make it work when you have to wait an hour to try again.)

I'm sure the development teams will weigh things carefully and I will work with the outcome. I truly appreciate the wonderful advances the Church has made by offering these tools and capabilities to us. I appreciate their fiscal conservatism as well, knowing that funding for projects like the calendar come from Church funds.

A big "Thanks!" to all those who work on these projects.

May I resurrect an issue first raised in 2012? The LDS calendar does not sync events for previous months. Events prior to the current month disappear from all my devices and laptops when the month changes. Past events are still shown in the online calendar, so the information is still there, but only the current month displays on my machines. Four years on, I am now a bishop and I find this limitation even more of a handicap. In planning meetings, using past decisions to guide future plans, referring to past dates in evaluations and so forth: "Which month/day in did we have that project? When does the stake usually hold that event?" etc. Of course, I can go online for the information but that is cumbersome and needs an internet connection. The lack of comment on this issue in the Forum suggests that for most people it is not an issue. For me, it is a sufficient problem I am tempted to abandon the LDS calendar and just use my own iCloud calendar. Will it ever be possible to sync more than 30 days of calendar data, perhaps as a user-configurable option?