How could the I-cloud drive eat download costs?

[iMore Question]

Since updating to Yosemite I have had grief with massive downloads, upto 50GB / day, and when your allowance us 40GB / month it is costly.
I have just received my iphone bill and that too has seen a massive increase in downloads quadrupling my monthly bill and then some.

After weeks of contacting Apple they acknowledged there was a problem 4 weeks ago and it lay with the I-cloud drive. They are still trying to resolve it so I have it switched off on my Mac, Iphone and Ipad and I don't know if I will get it back.

After initially downloading Yosemite I was warned by the broadband provider I was close to and had then exceeded my 40GB and this kept climbing alarmingly so I used time machine to get out of it. I also stepped up to unlimited in order to try Yosemite again at a later date.
When I updated my phone shortly after the same thing happened downloads went through the roof!

Strange!!!

Regards

John

 

[natasftw]

It sounds like the question you are really wanting to have answered is "What would iCloud be doing that uses so much data?"

That's a rather vague question. How many backups are you saving and what size are these? That's the first point I'd look at.
Downloading Yosemite should not have been that large of a chunk of your data. It'd have been several GB, but it wasn't pushing 40GB.

You've switched it off on all three. Are you able to monitor your usage with your provider? If so, try turning just the Mac back on. Watch the usage. If it seems to be out of control, you can troubleshoot further with that information. If it's normal, try turning just the iPhone back on. If that's normal, try having both the Mac and iPhone on. You can take little steps like these.

You also should probably move your backups away from the cloud and towards your Mac if you're only getting 40GB of data on your internet each month.