icalendar - Do internet calendar subscriptions (i.e. an ics url) automatically delete past events?

Question

I subscribed to an internet calendar (the kind with a url ending in .ics), and I noticed that in my calendar clients, future events will update just fine, but past events quickly disappear. Is this standard behavior for internet ical subscriptions? Or is it due to a particular configuration, either on the side of the calendar provider, or on the side of my client?

I didn't see any options in my client for "sync older events" or anything like that, so if it's either of the first two scenarios, are there any programs (ideally on either Android or Windows) that could essentially subscribe to an internet calendar and copy its events onto a different, local calendar, so as to preserve them indefinitely?

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65912045/do-internet-calendar-subscriptions-i-e-an-ics-url-automatically-delete-past-e

Answer 1

After doing some digging, I've determined the following:

1. There is no standard time window that internet calendars sync events.
2. That is determined by the provider of the internet calendar, and cannot be changed by a subscriber.
3. There are no common, universally applicable utilities that automate the copying of events from one calendar to another (in part because, on non-smartphone operating systems, the storage and management of calendars varies wildly by client).
4. However, Calendar Cloner is a free, open-source program that can be compiled and run on Android, which does automate the copying of events from one calendar to another. It does not support much complexity in terms of rules, but it gets the job done.
5. The simplest viable alternative for Windows might be to subscribe to the internet calendar in Outlook, then write a VBA macro (perhaps based off this one) to copy events to a new calendar. (That new calendar could be synced to other devices via various plugins that sync Outlook with Google Calendar or CalDAV calendars).