iCloud data usage warning.

[itareanlnotani]

Be *very* careful if you use iCloud and iPhoto.

I returned home this week, and apparently I've already used 1/4 of this months bandwidth (20G/75G total) in less than 4 days.

I had everything shut down, but traffic was still happening, even on a reboot.
This was worrying, as I suspected I had a hacked box.

brew installed lsof and iftop to get a better idea of what was happening, and could see that most of the traffic was going to an https site on AWS.

(after rebooting with nothing open except skype)

lsof showed that the traffic was being caused by cloudphoto of all things.


lsof | grep s3-us-west-2-w.amazonaws.com
cloudphot 392 lawrence 50u IPv4 0x8885a0d002260159 0t0 TCP lozretina.lan:54354->s3-us-west-2-w.amazonaws.com:https (ESTABLISHED)
cloudphot 392 lawrence 54u IPv4 0x8885a0d002260159 0t0 TCP lozretina.lan:54354->s3-us-west-2-w.amazonaws.com:https (ESTABLISHED)
LozRetina:~ lawrence$ ps -ef | grep 392
501 392 1 0 1:37PM ?? 0:03.95 /System/Library/CoreServices/cloudphotosd.app/Contents/MacOS/cloudphotosd


A quick google of iCloud upload issues shows that its not the first time its gone a bit crazy for people -
https://tidbits.com/article/15745


As we're bandwidth deprived here in .za, be careful, and uncheck any iCloud iPhoto boxes if any are ticked.

We monitor our ba(n)dwidth quite carefully, as we're on a capped connection, but that could have really hurt the pocket book if it happened on a cell connection...

 

[krycor]

I dunno.. mine seems fine but then i have had my iCloud photos since inception. One thing i did notice was that MacBook with iCloud enabled you have 2 options.. either optimised storage or full pull. I think this cam in a change to El Capitan so if you aren't aware.. the default is full pull.

 

[ghostR]

"bandwidth deprived"

yea, right...

 

[itareanlnotani]

I dunno.. mine seems fine but then i have had my iCloud photos since inception. One thing i did notice was that MacBook with iCloud enabled you have 2 options.. either optimised storage or full pull. I think this cam in a change to El Capitan so if you aren't aware.. the default is full pull.

I live in China most of the year, so my guess is iCloud decided it could finally see the iCloud servers (AWS is blocked in China), and started going backlog processing, yay!

I have about 90G of photos on this laptop, so that could have been painful.

I didn't have iCloud photo library checked though, it was doing "My Photo Stream".
I also don't pay for iCloud storage (as its useless to me - ZA - no bandwidth, China - no worky).
Given that I only have 5G of potential space, its interesting that it still decided to use 20G of bandwidth to not fill 5G of space.

Inefficient, and badly designed.