With the Library open you should see a “Calendars” folder there. I didn’t get the logic of that and still don’t, as it impedes routine troubleshooting like this and the Bluetooth snafu I covered here in April. OS X hides your Library by default-until 2011’s OS X Lion, it was viewable like any of your account’s other folders, from Documents to Downloads, but then Apple decided it was too risky to keep visible. Think browser bookmarks, your e-mail archives, application preferences… and your calendars. The Library folder is the system’s designated store for data that individual applications use but which you don’t view or edit outside of those apps.

Now switch to the Finder, hold down the Option key, click the “Go” menu and select the normally-hidden “Library” folder you revealed by holding down that modifier key. If you have no backup at all, please buy an external hard drive and set up Time Machine before you do anything else with your computer.) (If you had Time Machine active but recently had its backups stop because this OS X utility said your backup drive was out of space, see my advice on freeing up room. That should be nearly automatic in most Mac setups: Either you have your calendar synchronized to an online service like Google Calendar or Apple’s iCloud, or you have Apple’s Time Machine software automatically backing it up to a separate hard drive. If that doesn’t work, you should make sure you have a backup of your calendars before you do anything else. I know, I know tech-support departments always say that. Should your Mac’s copy of Calendar undergo this malfunction and fail to progress past a useless state in which it displays none of your existing schedules and has that “Updating calendars…” message stuck in front, you should first try restarting. I’ve had this happen enough times on my MacBook Air-although not, for whatever reason, on my older iMac-that I’ve all but memorized the routine to fix it. Now it doesn’t show any of my events and instead stays stuck on an “Updating calendars…” prompt. OS X’s Calendar app hung up on me, so I force-quit it.

Google calendar for macbook air desktop