iPad thrashing our home wifi
 

Since updating to iOS 13, whenever my iPad is plugged in to charge it starts soaking up our entire bandwidth. I cannot for the life of me work out what it is that it is doing ... backing something up, presumably, but I can’t see anything of significance that it wasn’t doing before. Can anyone suggest any obvious places to look that I might have missed?

It’s a real problem because we are on a long, slow ADSL line, with about 4mbit down and 0.5 up. The complete crawl that our internet becomes is typical of something soaking all our meagre upload, which is why I have been looking for things the iPad might be trying to back up (I know it’s not photos by the way, I have always had this turned off, and it still is).

Re: iPad thrashing our home wifi
 

Two options.

Ditch crapple and go for Android.

The other option is see if your router allows to to regulate what a device can download and restrict its bandwidth.

Surely iPads can see what is running?

Re: iPad thrashing our home wifi
 

It’s not an open app that’s doing it, it’s got to be somewhere in the backup and sync settings. It’s the fact it only does it when plugged in to mains power that suggests this - that’s typical behaviour of settings for backing up or downloading updates.

My working theory is that the update to iOS 13 has altered the backup routine in some way, possibly it is constantly incrementally backing up whereas previously it would have done it in one shot, once a week or two. Related to that, possibly I’m wondering whether the record of what has been backed up and what still needs it has been reset by the update. I have a fair few hundreds of MB of document files that exist in iCloud and/or MS OneDrive as well as on the iPad as I use it with a Bluetooth keyboard as a mini laptop at university. Perhaps it has started from scratch, synchronising all these files with their various cloud services. I don’t know.

And no, I can’t get anything useful out of the router as it is just the standard BT HomeHub 6, which has pants configurability or statistical output.

Re: iPad thrashing our home wifi
 

Check it hasnt enabled cloud backup. Mine suddenly came "on" and was backing up to icloud.

Re: iPad thrashing our home wifi
 

... that’s it.

As well as various of my apps that use iCloud storage routinely, iCloud backup was turned on - in effect a lot of my most storage-heavy apps (like MS Office suite) are utilising my iCloud storage twice, and attempting to dump it all in the cloud, every evening when I get home and connect to power, through my home Wi-fi and its measly 448kbit upload...

I have now turned iCloud backup off. Let’s see what happens.