iCloud: Understanding where iCloud Calendars are displayed in Calendar and in iCal

General information

In Calendar for OS X Mountain Lion and iCal for OS X Lion, your calendars can be stored in different sections depending on the location of the calendar.

In addition to iCloud Calendar, if you have set up a calendar account in Mail, Contacts, and Calendars in System Preferences for another service such as Microsoft Exchange, Gmail, or Yahoo! that supports calendars, these will have their own section in your Calendar List.

Calendars that you subscribe to, such as the Birthday Calendar, appear in the list as well.

iCal can also display local calendars. Local calendars are calendars that are just saved on your computer. They are not synced to iCloud or any other service. These calendars are specific to your local Mac OS User account. 

Calendars List in Calendars

To see the list of Calendars as well as where they are stored, click the Calendars button in Calendar. A new pane will open with your Calendar list. 

In the Calendar example below, there are no local calendars, only iCloud calendars. This is because any existing local calendars are merged with iCloud when you set up iCloud Calendar. If you are subscribing to calendars, or syncing with another calendar service such as an Exchange server, you will see a section containing those calendars in your list. 

Calendars List in iCal

To see the list of Calendars, as well as where they are stored, click the Calendars button in iCal. A pop-up menu will display your Calendar list.

In the iCal example below, Local Calendar is stored on your Mac, and the Home and Work calendars are stored on iCloud.

• The ON MY MAC section is for Calendars that are just saved on your computer. Changes to calendars and events in this section are not pushed to iCloud. They will not appear on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch when you are using iCloud Calendar.
• The ICLOUD section is for calendars that are saved on the iCloud Calendar servers. This can informally be referred to as the "remote" section as these calendars are synced copies of the Calendar information that is stored online with your iCloud account. Any changes made to these calendars will be pushed to all devices and computers that are set up to use iCloud Calendar.

Note: In many cases, you will only see the ICLOUD section in the Calendar List. This is because your local and remote calendars are merged when you set up iCloud Calendar.  

Considerations

When you are using Calendar (or iCal), be sure to pay attention to which Calendar you are interacting with and where it is stored. If you are creating or editing events and you want them to be in iCloud Calendar, those events need to be created in a Calendar that is in the ICLOUD section of the Calendar List.

You can check or change which Calendar an event is stored in the information pane for that Event. Double click an event to bring up its information pane: