Question about Apple calendar

Factual Questions
1

(I swear, it’s so much easier to ask questions here than to grind through Apple support)

There are things on my phone’s calendar that stay around forever. And then there are things that disappear. For instance: I make a haircut appointment and put it on my calendar…and then when the date passes, and I want to go back and answer the question “when did I last get my haircut?” the appointment is gone.

How can I make calendar appointments stick? Are there different kinds of “things” that one can put on their calendar?

2

AFAIK (and, in my personal experience) all calendar entries stay on the calendar forever. They are never, ever auto-deleted.

That said, there’s a lot of VooDoo having to doo with syncing and iCloud. Where were these events stored? Locally or on iCloud?

3

Pretty sure everything i do is stored locally. How would I tell?

4

This is my experience, and I’ve had nothing but Apple cellphones for ages. Perhaps there is a configurable setting that is doing it for some reason. I would Google it and see if anyone else has seen your problem.

5

I just discovered that the missing events are still on the laptop version of the calendar; they’ve only disappeared from my phone. Aha. Hmm.

6

I think I’ve fixed it but I’m not sure I understand it.

The settings for Calendar on the iPhone include a “Sync” setting, with options “2 weeks back”, “1 month back” … “All Events”. It had been set to “2 weeks back”. i changed it to “All Events” and all my missing appointments have reappeared on my phone.

I think I essentially don’t quite get what “sync” does.

7

It sounds like your appointments are being stored in iCloud (or some other cloud service).
That means that each computer keeps tabs on a central list of appointments that’s saved on your account on an Apple server somewhere. When you create an appointment on your laptop, your laptop updates this list; and when your phone later checks the list, it sees the new appointment and shows it on your phone as well.

With that in mind, your settings on the laptop (and now on your phone too) are such that it downloads & displays all events on the list. Your phone, on the other hand, was originally set to only download & display events going back two weeks.

8

I think it’s something like what you describe, but in reverse. I only create appointments on my phone, never on my laptop.