I'm away for a few days, and I have my MiFi box with me. Today, I've been working on a talk I'm giving next week, so I had Keynote and Pages open. In Mac OX Lion, these apps save as and when, rather than when you hit Command+S.

So, lots of hopping between the two apps, and, I guess a lot of saving. After about 2 and a half hours, I notice that the MiFi device is reporting that I have used over 1GB of bandwidth. Looking at the device's status page, I see that the majority of that 1GB is upload.

So, something on Lion is throwing huge slabs of data at the web. I suppose 20 saves for each document will do that, and as I had iCloud set to handle documents online, those changes were, I assume, being uploaded.

However, I'm at a loss as to where that data is stored. The iCloud control panel only seems to sow data stored from the iPad, not the Mac, so HAS all that data been uploaded? I really can't tell.

I have also loaded some images from my camera onto Aperture on the laptop - so Photostream may be at work. This evening, I loaded Little Snitch to see if that will be more illuminating. It isn't really. It tells me that certain processes are transferring data, but it doesn't seem to tell me what is being sent or how much data is being sent. So I'm at a loss to know see what could be causing these huge data transfer.

Even with the laptop sitting idle this evening, there still seems to be a lot of traffic. Last t e I used the laptop in combination with this device, I was running Snow Leopard, and there was no iCloud to speak of, so data rates we more acceptable. Thankfully, I'm in the "gratis" period for the MiFi, so I have a shed load of bandwidth. However next time I'm likely to be using tin this way, I'll be buying data in blocks of 1 GB (or more), so I'd like to be able to clamp down on data transfers like this.

I turned off DropBox, but I still have an iDisk (though that's not needed to sync any files).

One thing I did without thinking about it was to tell my IPhone to backup to iCloud. Next thing I know ive run out of space on the iCloud storage.

Might be worth checking in settings where you are backing up to.

Not backing the iOS devices to iCloud. The machine that handles that is elsewhere anyway. It seems that the PhotoStreamAgent is doing a lot of communicating with the servers (which appear to be in Ireland, and run by Amazon if LittleSnitch is to be trusted). I have no idea what it’s doing, whether it’s sending files or what.

Ah, don't know then.

Although, the settings for where your device backups up to is actually in the device iCloud settings and all the icloud backups are done over the air.

iCloud backups are handled by iTunes. Yes, I can sync over Wifi, but only if the "home machine" is available. The bandwidth seems to be created by my MBP here, not the iPad. I suspect it's PhotoStream syncing. I don't know if this uploads the RAW files or processed JPEGs. However, as the connection here is so flaky, the upload will start, fail, and start again. That, I guess, may account for the bandwidth use.

No, they are done by the device directly over the internet when connected to Wifi...

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4859

Backups to your iMac or PC (or whatever) are done by iTuunes but to iCloud it is done directly on the device if it has a Wifi internet connection.

When I first installed iOS5 it popped up a question asking if I wanted to backup to iCloud and I hit yes without thinking about it. It was only when I went to check my storage because it had run out that I realised what was happening.

IIRC isn't it the case it does the icloud backup if you're on a wifi network and it's getting power through the connector port? And it does the iTunes wireless sync if the above two are true and your Mac/PC is on the same network. So if you just leave your phone on a shelf, it shouldn't do the backups nightly. I assume if you have one of those extra battery pack things it considers that to be 'on power' too.

Photostream is different I think, that happens all the time regardless of charging state and wifi connection. if you're taking lots of pics on the iPhone, that will then cause a lot of data to be sent back and forth, regardless of where you are or what your phone's state is.

You guys must have a lot of stuff being backed up. I've got an iPhone 4 and a 64GB iPad both on iCloud backup and it's only taking up about 1.4GB...

Jon

Ah, you might be right about the power thing.

I know that you certainly need to be plugged in to initiate a wifi sync with iTunes.

Having said that though I've never been able to do it as my iPhone thinks my iTunes isn't available?!

Backing up to iCloud on the iPad is off. It’s not backed up to the iCloud when syncing with iTunes either. The iPad isn’t a suspect in this case. I suspect it’s Photo Stream, looking at the chatter I was getting when running Little Snitch.

It would if the iPhone and the PC/Mac are on different subnets. That'd be down to how your wifi is configured.

Jon

Oh ho! Aperture is not just uploading a JPEG proxy for the image - it appears to be uploading the full RAW file. Cool feature, but not something you will want to do over a 3G connection!