Heads up fellow RV travelers! If you’re using any type of mobile personal hotspot and you’re using a Mac as well, pay attention to your data usage. Yesterday I noted that our Mi-Fi hotspot with a 10GB limit had jumped 2.5GB in one afternoon. How had we used that much bandwidth?
An Apple process gone rogue.
This morning when I got up I connected to my iPhone instead of the Mi-Fi. I booted up my computer and went outside for a few minutes. When I came back in I looked at my Activity Monitor (a tool in your utilities) and saw that I had already used 75MB of data in about 5 minutes!!!!
We’re gonna need a dish for all this bandwidth waste!
What was running? My browser was closed, my mail was closed, I don’t have auto updates on. I took a look at the activity monitor and it showed the “nsurlsessiond” was the culprit. What is that process? Well, it’s my Mac talking to the clouds about my IPhoto images.
Hey, wait a sec. I don’t use IPhoto at all. I’m a Lightroom guy. As a matter of fact, in my system preferences I had unchecked IPhoto in my ICloud settings. What the heck?
Checking into my system preferences and the ICloud settings I found IPhoto and its syncing turned back on. This wasn’t something I did, it happily turned itself back on recently. Weirder than that, often my ITunes will just randomly turn itself on.
Just posting this as a warning to other Mac users who recently did the latest system update. Make sure syncing is turned off if you’re like us and dependent on your mobile hotspots for your Internet connectivity. Don’t want to see anyone go over their limits!
Comments 2
I have seen settings like the ones you mention and also location services turn on, seemingly by gremlins. I believe that the periodic small updates and fixes that Apple pushes out are the offenders. I have developed the habit of monitoring these.
Author
You’re right Dagny. Have to check after each update now. It’s funny, Mac’s “Gremlins” seem to be growing.