Do you have a large iCalendar file with lots of old entries, and would like to archive them to save space and resources? At least those of us using KOrganizer know that turning on and off an event set become slower and slower the more entries are in the set. While working on migrating our calendars to a Radicale CalDAV server on our Freedombox server, my loved one wondered if I could find a way to split up the calendar file she had in KOrganizer, and I set out to write a tool. I spent a few days writing and polishing the system, and it is now ready for general consumption. The code for ical-archiver is publicly available from a git repository on github. The system is written in Python and depend on the vobject Python module.
To use it, locate the iCalendar file you want to operate on and give it as an argument to the ical-archiver script. This will generate a set of new files, one file per component type per year for all components expiring more than two years in the past. The vevent, vtodo and vjournal entries are handled by the script. The remaining entries are stored in a 'remaining' file.
This is what a test run can look like:
% ical-archiver t/2004-2016.ics Found 3612 vevents Found 6 vtodos Found 2 vjournals Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2004.ics Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2005.ics Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2006.ics Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2007.ics Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2008.ics Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2009.ics Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2010.ics Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2011.ics Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2012.ics Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2013.ics Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2014.ics Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vjournal-2007.ics Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vjournal-2011.ics Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vtodo-2012.ics Writing t/2004-2016.ics-remaining.ics %
As you can see, the original file is untouched and new files are written with names derived from the original file. If you are happy with their content, the *-remaining.ics file can replace the original the the others can be archived or imported as historical calendar collections.
The script should probably be improved a bit. The error handling when discovering broken entries is not good, and I am not sure yet if it make sense to split different entry types into separate files or not. The program is thus likely to change. If you find it interesting, please get in touch. :)
As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.