iPhone 5S going mental - what are the reset options?

[Cassady]

This is getting a bit ridiculous now....

These stats are since Monday morning.
I have Wifi at home, where I do most of my browsing. Have hardly used the phone for browsing since Monday, and I'm not what one would call an "active" messenger/social media poster etc.. For most of last year, my 500mb plan would be more than enough...

Anyone experiencing the same?

Suggestions on the web point to iCloud – how the iPhone appears to be trying to sync Dictionary and Keyboard shortcuts every 90 seconds, according to some people's logs, pulled into XCode.

As an aside – I did a Cellular Data Tracking (whatever) reset on Monday – the TOTAL data spent on the rest of my Apps (emails, Omnifocus, Feedly, Safari; Fantastical; Cricinfo; etc. in this period, has been: 76.6mb [the biggest user was a 18mb download via AppStore, and 22 odd mb's for the initial OF sync].

So of the 324 MB spent since MONDAY, 76.6 is trackable. The other 246 MB is to be found inside System Services, with Documents & Sync sitting at 221 MB??

Please note:
iCloud Drive has the "Use Mobile Data" toggled OFF.
iCloud Photo Library (Beta) is off.
My Photo Stream is on, but it says it only uses Wifi (I any event event only have 113 in the photo stream).
Mobile Data is OFF under iTunes & App Store (ignoring the 18mb one I downloaded, before flicking the toggle).
Background App Refresh is off for all but a selection of NB apps, and those are accounted for in the breakdown above.
Enable 4G is off.

So, in light of the above, how and where is that "Documents & Sync" taking place?

Are my stats similar to anyone else using iOS 8 (updated to 8.2 yesterday evening)?

Would appreciate some thoughts!

 

[Rickster]

Just wipe the thing and start fresh.

 

[Cassady]

Just wipe the thing and start fresh.

I did! On Monday!

Downloaded latest IPSW, started it up as new, individually installed the apps over from iTunes.

 

[Maverick Jester]

I did! On Monday!

Downloaded latest IPSW, started it up as new, individually installed the apps over from iTunes.

So much for iOS just working

This seems to be a bug in iCloud. Have a read here and here, hopefully either helps you.

 

[Cassady]

Thanks.

Definitely an iCloud issue. I've started disabling some of them – deleted Notability off my phone, and turned off others I don't use in iCloud on the Mac. Also deleted Photo Stream.

Here's how well things are going: Since I popped up the pic above, I've browsed through Feedly over lunch. 2,6 mb.

Documents and sync? That only jumped from 214 mb, to 258. That's 44 mb's with the phone plugged in on the desk next to me, in 90 minutes of only browsing Feedly.

Farkin spectacular.

 

[Cassady]

Now at 308 mb. And nothing is being used on the phone/nothing open in the background.

Joy.

 

[Maverick Jester]

Wow, that's pretty bad.

 

[Cassady]

Wow, that's pretty bad.

Tell me about it! :wtf:

At least the madness seems to have stopped today. Popped up something over at iPhoneza, and was about to start trying the suggestions – I had eventually signed out from iCloud, just to stop the bleeding.

Something made me sign back in first. My apps that were using iCloud, suddenly repopulated – which I suspect might have reset everything.

By way of background – after my reset on Monday, when I checked out the Settings>>iCloud tab, only a few apps were listed. I didn't think much of this, since I figured it simply due to my not having reactivated the iCloud services again in all the apps, after the fresh install.

When I signed out, and then signed back in, the full list (from PRIOR to the Reset on Monday) was back up. All I can surmise, is that iCloud must have been dialling back to the mothership, looking for those other apps – and it overrode my settings, by going via Cellular.

Since the above, I've now used 36.6mb in Documents & Sync – so that's basically from this morning at 09h00, until now – which is(????) still a bit high (but maybe not) – but is at least not close to 100mb and more a day!

Hoping this has sorted it now – will pop something up in a day or so...

 

[SauRoNZA]

Okay I think I know what your problem is.

When you upgraded to iOS8 did you choose NOT to use iCloud Drive?

If so I'm pretty sure that is your problem right there. Had similar problem with a friend's phone raping data and it seems that hte "use mobile data" option disappears when NOT using iCloud Drive but remains on transparently in the background.

So the simple solution is, switch ON iCloud drive in the options screen and do the activation process and then you'll see there's suddenly a magical "use mobile data" for iCloud backups button that appears.

Obviously switch that off and problem solved.

Have solved this for three people now and it's been the same case with them all.

*****

oh and it was actually Whatsapp eating the data over mobile to do it's backups. So it might actually be a Whatsapp related problem, but the lack of iCloud drive was in fact the source.

Sadly your entire reset/reinstall was for nothing.

 

[Cassady]

Okay I think I know what your problem is.

When you upgraded to iOS8 did you choose NOT to use iCloud Drive?

If so I'm pretty sure that is your problem right there. Had similar problem with a friend's phone raping data and it seems that hte "use mobile data" option disappears when NOT using iCloud Drive but remains on transparently in the background.

So the simple solution is, switch ON iCloud drive in the options screen and do the activation process and then you'll see there's suddenly a magical "use mobile data" for iCloud backups button that appears.

Obviously switch that off and problem solved.

Have solved this for three people now and it's been the same case with them all.

*****

oh and it was actually Whatsapp eating the data over mobile to do it's backups. So it might actually be a Whatsapp related problem, but the lack of iCloud drive was in fact the source.

Sadly your entire reset/reinstall was for nothing.

Appreciate the reply – but don't think that's me. I went for iCloud Drive from the get-go. I did stay away from that iPhoto Beta story at some point, but having had Mavericks and Yosemite on the Mac, I dived all-in on iCloud Drive, and used to regularly sync to my device through Finder.

That being said – you raise an interesting point. The "Use Mobile Data" toggle is there now, but I cannot remember if it has always been there – I just presumed it was. I could certainly toggle the individual apps from using iCloud, and I've always monitored that....

Regardless though, whatever iCloud was doing – it was doing in spite of my toggles telling it to only use WiFi. I had engaged everything that could be engaged, requesting WiFi instead of Cellular – didn't seem to make the slightest difference.

From my initial post – all this started with Greg Pearce looking through my logs and telling me there was crazy chit-chat going on in the background – I initially thought Drafts was to blame (it was using way too much data – but obviously iCloud was going mental as well, unbeknown to me – I had my eye on Drafts all the time!).

Re Whatsapp – fortunately, I did that at home. It was only a 54mb download, that finished on Wifi. It's certainly improved – gives you a menu with the progress bar etc., so you know what's happening. All that was done Monday AM before coming to work – then all hell broke loose, with the phone (mostly) simply sitting on the table, "doing nuffink!"...

 

[Maverick Jester]

Tell me about it! :wtf:

At least the madness seems to have stopped today. Popped up something over at iPhoneza, and was about to start trying the suggestions – I had eventually signed out from iCloud, just to stop the bleeding.

Something made me sign back in first. My apps that were using iCloud, suddenly repopulated – which I suspect might have reset everything.

By way of background – after my reset on Monday, when I checked out the Settings>>iCloud tab, only a few apps were listed. I didn't think much of this, since I figured it simply due to my not having reactivated the iCloud services again in all the apps, after the fresh install.

When I signed out, and then signed back in, the full list (from PRIOR to the Reset on Monday) was back up. All I can surmise, is that iCloud must have been dialling back to the mothership, looking for those other apps – and it overrode my settings, by going via Cellular.

Since the above, I've now used 36.6mb in Documents & Sync – so that's basically from this morning at 09h00, until now – which is(????) still a bit high (but maybe not) – but is at least not close to 100mb and more a day!

Hoping this has sorted it now – will pop something up in a day or so...

Have you considered the other option of creating an all-new iCloud account?

 

[SauRoNZA]

Do you have "Use Mobile Data" off while all this is happening though?

If you don't it will eat 2gb a month easily as "system service" which turns out to be Whatsapp making it's chat backups. So you can try and switch it off in Whatsapp directly as well.

Could very well be that the "Use Mobile Data" gets stuck as a setting during the upgrade but doesn't actually change the visual toggle, so maybe you switch it on and off somewhere in the mission an dit updated correctly.

 

[Cassady]

Have you considered the other option of creating an all-new iCloud account?

I was about to go that route – but then the sign-in/out appeared to do the trick. Might still need to.

Will need to research it a bit more, since to be honest, I'm not entirely clear on what it actually means, in effect – i.e. what would need to happen on the Mac/iPad side (if anything) as well, in order to be sure syncing etc. still works properly...

 

[Cassady]

Do you have "Use Mobile Data" off while all this is happening though?

If you don't it will eat 2gb a month easily as "system service" which turns out to be Whatsapp making it's chat backups. So you can try and switch it off in Whatsapp directly as well.

Yes – it was certainly off since Monday, when everything was going down – and if it was there before then, it would have been off. As mentioned, things started going awry since middle of last year, but never as drastic as now.

I did plenty of reading at the time, to make sure I wasn't leaking data usage to something that could be forced through Wifi – so very confident I had done everything I needed to this side. Which is what was so frustrating – it was burning data with me doing virtually nothing, AND I had no way to stop it, barring hitting Airplane Mode.

 

[Maverick Jester]

I was about to go that route – but then the sign-in/out appeared to do the trick. Might still need to.

Will need to research it a bit more, since to be honest, I'm not entirely clear on what it actually means, in effect – i.e. what would need to happen on the Mac/iPad side (if anything) as well, in order to be sure syncing etc. still works properly...

You can have multiple iCloud accounts synced on your devices, but only the main one listed will sync Photo Stream, Documents & Data and Backup. Perhaps it would be worth it to have the fresh iCloud account as the main one for the iPhone, at least to confirm that it fixes your issue?

 

[Cassady]

You can have multiple iCloud accounts synced on your devices, but only the main one listed will sync Photo Stream, Documents & Data and Backup. Perhaps it would be worth it to have the fresh iCloud account as the main one for the iPhone, at least to confirm that it fixes your issue?

I'll do that. I'm going to watch things then, and start experimenting where needs be. I would be very surprised if this is anything BUT some iCloud bug that I have managed to exploit somehow, so a fresh account should confirm things quickly (hopefully).

 

[Cassady]

Just checked: 2.15 GBs since 1 March. Joy. Hope this doesn't bite any of you – it's eina!

 

[Lord Flacko]

You don't use Whatsapp by any chance do you ?

 

[Cassady]

You don't use Whatsapp by any chance do you ?

Always have. But as mentioned - until midway through last year, this was never an issue. Why would it now suddenly change - my usage of it certainly hasn't- in fact, I'd say I use it less now than what I did then.

 

[Maverick Jester]

I'm going to take a shot in the dark here- but is there not the possibility that this issue is related to your AppleID issue? It could be possible that the iCloud bug is triggered by your use of a refurbished iPhone 5S (which I suspect yours is, as Core do not do replacements with new devices).

Perhaps see if you can sort that issue out, and the impact it has on this issue. The timing of this incident seems to correlate with when your 5S was replaced.