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Help reading large ics file into TB 102.2.2

Chris Evans
Chris Evans
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I am migrating back to TB after seven years with zimbra and so have to import exports from zimbra. I am running TB 102.2.2 in an daily updated Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS machine with a AMD® Ryzen 7 5800h processor and 64Gb of RAM (and oodles of spare HD space).

My calendar ics file is pretty huge, 23.2Mb and when I try to import it into TB TB seems to hang (get the "quit or wait" message in Ubuntu). I'm not surprised as I guess this is an antisocially large ICS file. I can read it with some roll my own R code and see that it has 419,184 lines and, somewhat reassuringly, R detects 11,845 "BEGIN:VEVENT" lines and 11,845 "END:VEVENT" lines so I think I can conclude that I have that many events!

I can apply my mind and clunky programming skills to R and split this file into smaller ones but I thought I'd ask a few questions here before I start that:

Q1: do I copy everything from "BEGIN:VCALENDAR" to the first "BEGIN:VEVENT" as a header for each smaller file I create?

Q2: does anyone have any advice about how small and therefore how many small files I should create to be fairly safe for TB to read them OK?

Q3: am I correct that I don't have to worry about date ordering the entries? I can just take them in the order they come in the big file?

Many thanks in advance. Rather nice to be coming back to TB, I always liked it but wrongly thought it was in organisational peril seven years ago. Should have stayed!

Chris

I am migrating back to TB after seven years with zimbra and so have to import exports from zimbra. I am running TB 102.2.2 in an daily updated Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS machine with a AMD® Ryzen 7 5800h processor and 64Gb of RAM (and oodles of spare HD space). My calendar ics file is pretty huge, 23.2Mb and when I try to import it into TB TB seems to hang (get the "quit or wait" message in Ubuntu). I'm not surprised as I guess this is an antisocially large ICS file. I can read it with some roll my own R code and see that it has 419,184 lines and, somewhat reassuringly, R detects 11,845 "BEGIN:VEVENT" lines and 11,845 "END:VEVENT" lines so I think I can conclude that I have that many events! I can apply my mind and clunky programming skills to R and split this file into smaller ones but I thought I'd ask a few questions here before I start that: Q1: do I copy everything from "BEGIN:VCALENDAR" to the first "BEGIN:VEVENT" as a header for each smaller file I create? Q2: does anyone have any advice about how small and therefore how many small files I should create to be fairly safe for TB to read them OK? Q3: am I correct that I don't have to worry about date ordering the entries? I can just take them in the order they come in the big file? Many thanks in advance. Rather nice to be coming back to TB, I always liked it but wrongly thought it was in organisational peril seven years ago. Should have stayed! Chris

All Replies (1)

Chris Evans
Chris Evans Question owner
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Well, replying to myself. I think I may have been wrong about TB locking up on the import, I think it may be that at the rate TB was getting to push things back to the server (competing on a slow broadband line with my cloud backups). I did split the file into 30 smaller bits each of 400 entries and even loading each of those is slow. Answers to my own questions: Q1: I dropped those header rows except for "BEGIN:VCALENDAR" and don't seem to have suffered Q2: as I say, I suspect you don't have to worry about this, just expect the process to take a very long time, perhaps influenced by your internet upload speed (or not, can't vouch for that) Q3: I think the answer is that the order of the entries in the ICS file doesn't matter.