iCloud has high data usage, kills battery

I too have experienced a huge increase in data usage since moving my calendars to iCloud. It's weird though: On my wife's iPhone 3GS and my iPhone 4 (both with iOS 5), something like 5-7MB of data gets consumed every time there is a calendar update pushed out. This easily adds up to more than 30MB of 3G usage per day without doing much else. However, we have the same calendars synced to our iPad 2 also, and the iPad only consumes a few hundred KB for the same updates.

Before I go to the (immense!) trouble of doing restore without using the old backup, is anyone out there aware of a different fix for this problem? Why are our phones affected but not the iPad?

I downloaded ios 5 for my iPhone 4 (not 4s) Sunday nite –last day in billing cycle for phone was Tuesday and I received the txt that Ihad used 65% of my 200mb plan…That Has NEVER Happened!

Between Wednesday and Tuesday evening I had used 5mb noteven using the data plan. I’ve been searching forums and this is a huge problem especially for people who do not check their data and then they find out they’ve gone over! I did not find anything that would fix so I started messing with the phone. I turned off ALL notifications – removed icloud (or deleted the account) but the data kept racking up! What I ultimately ended up doing (and it Seems to be a temp fix) I turn on my wifi even if there isn’t one to connect to– leave the cellular data ON…this Stopped the data from increasing!! One twis tis – if you do get to a hot spot with wifi available (such as home) TURN OFF THE CELLULAR DATA! When I arrived home yesterd ayafter discovering the fix I checked my

Data and it was going up again…so I turned OFF the cellular data and once again it stopped! I tested this with a friends iphone and he did not have to turn off the cell data when in a hot spot so I’m not sure if that varies with different models – I have the 4 and he has the 3…So give it a shot!! I hope this at least helps some people because this can be a COSTLY Problem!!

My problem was related to the size of my calendar (nearly 10,000 items). I was able to work around it by slimming down the calendar and/or changing the Sync setting from All Events to Events 6 Months Back. See https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3422039 for details.

DELETE / SIGN OFF from iCLOUD on your iPhones. Seems there is a bug in the iCloud which keeps sending and receiving data on the 3G cellular connection.

AGAIN! DELETE / SIGN OFF from iCLOUD on your iPhones and save on your 3G data and battery drain.

Power guru is right, only way to save the data plan is to remove iCloud !!!

Even the icloud switch off wasn't good for me.

I tried everything - see another post - and I have now had to go back to factory settings and am adding back items one by one.

My iPad IS affected - 85mb just today for doing nothing and being near wifi most of the day and icloud off.

I've been a bit iffy on the whole iCloud thing ever since I heard about it. I don't think it's a necessity thing to have....I have 3 ipods and each one has specific things I don't want on my other ipods. Getting iCloud would obliterate all my work done to each ipod and would render them all the same...which is not only stupid but extremely impractical! Other than the music, it seems like iCloud would make people lazier than before and not as self-reliant than they were...by always syncing to the cloud.

I believe that leaving your work and your goods to the cloud to sort out is not only risky but also foolish.

I prefer to stay hard wired.

I know what you mean about iCloud - you do have to make sure you don't unthinkingly leave everything to the cloud and wonder why you're in trouble when your internet connect goes down.

But I wouldn't go so far to say that it is risky and foolish.

You see I'm in the opposite position to you and I do want all my devices to have the same things on them, otherwise I will never be sure what device has got what and which one has the up to date file. So I use DropBox (which has been a fully working safe cloud for quite a few years now) which also has the advantage of putting real files on a real computer so that they're all available when the internet goes down and I can back them up as well.

I'm starting to use iCloud as well as it gives some benefits that DropBox and my existing Exchnage Server do not.

So you're right that you do have to think through and take steps not to leave everything to the cloud, but overall I've found it a huge benefit.

It seems you can see the benefit for music though - you just need to think that maybe other people see benefits in other areas.

After 2 times it appears that a restore NOT from a backup has magicaly reduce the icloud data usage.

With same network locations, wifi and 3G i'm now at 100Mb on my data plan after 10 days (had before 100Mb per day !!!).

So far we're using iCloud in our house for Calendars, Contacts, and Find My iPhone. It has been very helpful for calendaring, except, as I've indicated before, if you have a lot of calendar history the over the air updates take a lot of data. (See https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3422039.)

I too used to feel that keeping my data in the cloud was "risky and foolish", but the benefits of being able to see and update each other's calendars through the day in our very busy lives has changed my mind.

It's not true that the data is inaccessible if your internet connection goes away. Each of our iPhones, iPad, and Outlook on my PC keeps a local copy of the calendar data that is perfectly useable when there is no network connection.

My only concern in this regard is that on my Windows PC the data seems to be stored in some proprietary iCloud database format rather than in a file that Outlook natively understands (such as a .pst or .ost). This means it's hard for me to know for sure how complete the cache is and therefore whether my regular backup process is preserving all of my data. But I figure that between Apple's own redundancy measures that they are probably taking with iCloud, and the cached copies of the data on my iDevices and my PC, I'm probably okay.

I'm pretty sure my battery problem is tied into unexplained high usage and data use when I'm on 3G. When I'm on WiFi, things are not bad with the battery. When I'm on STANDBY and am on 3G, there is about 1h of unexplained usage reported over 10 hours. Battery takes a significant hit during this time. My AT&T bill shows I've gone from < 200 mb/ month to > 700 over 21 days.. and I'm using the phone LESS due to battery concrens.

I've turned off everything I can stomach; I don't want to turn this into a Dumb phone. Curiously, turning off 'cellular data' has not helped battery life much. I'm not sure if there's a bug there-- could the phone still be sending data with it the setting off? Turning off iCloud backup didn't do anything. The next test will be deleting parts of the iCloud connection and then deleting the account altogether.