I made a huge mistake enabling calendar synchronization and now I’m dealing with a nightmare.
I decided to try the Google Calendar sync feature in TickTick because it seemed like it would fit perfectly with my workflow. My plan was simple - let everything flow into my inbox and then organize from there.
At first everything looked great, but then I started noticing problems. The sync was pulling in recurring appointments and showing them with wrong dates. Some of these recurring items I actually wanted to keep, so I marked them as completed in TickTick. That worked fine and they updated properly.
But here’s where things went terribly wrong. There were other recurring items I didn’t need cluttering up my task list, so I deleted them from TickTick thinking it would just remove them from my tasks.
When I checked my Google Calendar later, I was horrified to discover that those events had been completely removed from my calendar too. Even worse, when I went to the trash folder to restore them, I found tons of other future appointments that had also been deleted somehow.
Now I’m stuck manually restoring everything, and many of the dates got shifted by a day in either direction during the sync process. This integration has caused me more problems than it solved.
Has anyone else experienced similar issues with this feature? I’m starting to think it’s not worth the risk.
Been there with calendar sync disasters, just different apps. This is exactly why I stopped trusting two-way syncs for important stuff. Wish I’d backed up my Google Calendar first - Google Takeout exports everything and would’ve saved me tons of headache. That date shifting thing? Usually timezone conflicts. TickTick’s probably reading your events in a different timezone than Google Calendar. After my own sync nightmare, I went manual. Keep my calendar separate and just reference it when planning tasks. More work but I actually sleep at night knowing my appointments won’t vanish. Auto-sync convenience isn’t worth the stress when it breaks. If you get everything back, kill the sync and keep them separate. Old school works better sometimes.
ugh, same thing happened to my friend with ticktick sync. it treats tasks and calendar events as one thing, so deleting one wipes out the other. i never delete anything during sync now - just mark the unwanted stuff complete. takes longer but beats losing everything.
Oh man, I feel your pain. TickTick’s Google Calendar sync is notorious for this - the bidirectional sync gets confused with recurring events and treats deletions as permanent removals instead of just hiding them from your tasks.
I hit the same issue last year juggling multiple work calendars. These built-in syncs are too rigid and don’t let you control what happens on each side.
You need smarter automation that handles sync logic properly. I built a workflow that monitors both systems with different rules for each event type - recurring events only sync new instances and never delete the source, while one-time events can safely manage both sides.
The key is conditional logic that knows the difference between “remove from my tasks” and “delete from calendar entirely”. Most native integrations can’t make that distinction.
I built this whole system using Latenode since it lets you create custom sync rules with safety checks. You can set it so deletions in your task manager never touch original calendar events, but completions still sync properly.
Check it out at https://latenode.com
This sync mess is exactly why I always test integration features on dummy data first. Learned that the hard way when I accidentally wiped out a client’s entire project timeline years ago.
For the immediate fix, Google Calendar’s trash recovery should get most of your events back within 30 days. The date shifting happens when apps handle timezones differently during sync - check if TickTick and Google Calendar are both set to the same timezone.
Here’s a video that walks through the recovery process:
Once you restore your calendar, kill that sync completely. TickTick’s implementation doesn’t distinguish between task management and calendar management actions. Delete a synced item and it assumes you want it gone everywhere.
I handle this by keeping my calendar read-only in task apps. Events flow in but I never modify them from the task side. All calendar changes happen directly in Google Calendar. Extra step, but it prevents these disasters.
The recurring event chaos you described is super common with bidirectional syncs. They can’t handle the concept that you might want to see an event as a task once without deleting the whole series.
