On your last day, the calendar leaves with the account
4-minute read
On your last day, someone removes your account. Within the hour your work calendar disappears from your Mac, your phone and your watch — and takes several years’ worth of where you were and who you saw with it.
Most people never think about this until the week it happens, and then they think about it urgently. The calendar is a record: when the project actually started, which fortnight you were on leave, how many hours went into the thing you are now being asked about. Freelancers have the same problem in a different shape — a client’s system holds the schedule, the engagement ends, and so does your access to your own timesheet evidence.
A mirror is an archive that maintains itself
The copies live in your calendar, not theirs. A mirror writes ordinary events into a calendar in your own account. When the pair is deleted — or when the source calendar disappears entirely because the account went with the job — the copies stay exactly where they are, as normal events you own. Nothing is clawed back.
This is a deliberate property rather than an accident. If the source calendar can’t be found, the mirror reports the failure — in the menu bar, in the log, and as an all-day warning in the destination — and stops. It does not interpret “the source is gone” as “delete everything”. The one time that behaviour matters most is the week you are least able to supervise it.
If you are setting this up in your last month
- Raise the past window first. A pair copies 30 days back and a year ahead by default. Set the past window to cover as much history as you want kept — 1095 for three years — and let it run once before the account goes.
- Use Full copy for an archive. Notes are where the useful detail usually is, and this is the one case where you want all of it.
- Point it at a dedicated calendar — Acme (archive) — so the history doesn’t mix with your live week and can be unticked when you don’t need it.
- Let it finish, then check the count in the app before the account is removed.
What this doesn’t fix
Attendees are not copied, so an archived event records the meeting and not the invitee list. Attachments don’t come across either. And the obvious one: exporting your employer’s calendar data to a personal account may not be yours to do — some of it is genuinely theirs, and a few contracts say so explicitly. A busy-only archive, which keeps the times and none of the content, is the version that is almost always defensible.