Backing up to iCloud Slows Internet Connection Down

I have found the exact same thing happening on my network. I have 4 x iPhone 4 + 1 x iPad, so you can imagine it's like being back in the dark days of dial-up! The idea of backing up to iCould is great but I have had to switch off this facility on my devices so I can use the internet again.

A question for the guys in Cupertino - is there any way to back up to iCloud by wire, so that subsequent wireless backups are incremental and therefore only small?

The iOS iCloud back up uses your upstream bandwidth. My iPad 2 backs up about 1.8gb of data and my 3GS about 700mb. Even if you had 50Mbuts down but less than 1-2Mbit up, that backup will slow your whole connection down for a bit. After the first back up, the rest are incremental and go quickly. I have 145mbit den and 15mbit up. I never see a slowdown because apples iCloud won't let me send data as fast as 15mbit/sec to it

Chances are it is bottle necking your upstream. But it shoud only do that once and for a few hrs tops.

U can always turn it off and back up to iTunes instead

Remeber if your upstream gets filled up, you can ave 1000000mbit down and it will grind to a halt when your upstream is overloaded

I still have this problem. I wish they could have had some kind of smart throttling system for these backups.

I Wish there was a hybrid iCloud/iTunes backup to iCloud with throttling in place. So if your device needs to backup a huge amount have iTunes do it then as your computer sits idle at night it syncs with iCloud. rhst plus a way in iTunes to restore smarter such as rollback to a certain point or only restore certain items would be cool.

Hello. It's been a little while since this topic was posted, but I'm wondering if you ever found a solution?

Personally, I've been using iCloud backup since it's inception and I've never experienced anything like this problem. However, just a couple of months ago, I started noticing the network drop in the evening. I even switched ISPs because I thought it was their fault. When the problem persisted, eventually I tracked it down to iOS devices backing up to iCloud.

Now that I know what the problem is, I can reproduce it 100% of the time. I will manually start an iCloud backup and within 1 minute, the network slows to an unusable crawl. Sometimes the ping reaches more than 2000 with .01 Mbps download speeds. Within seconds of cancelling the backup, the internet returns to normal. If I don't cancel the backup, iCloud will eventually stop trying to backup, but this can take more than a half hour and the device never backs up.

I've isolated it to iCloud by checking against uploading other large files (10GB+) to my work computer over the internet while concurrently downloading large files back to my computer. There are virtually no slow down issues (none worth noting anyway, as the download speeds might drop a bit, but I'd still able to also stream HD Video from Netflix).

One thing I think is odd is the 1 minute delay before the issue starts. Clearly the iCloud backup starts, it will even give me a reasonable estimated time it'll take. But just before the minute mark, that number ticks up and that's when all other internet usage fizzles out. It makes me wonder what's happening in the background when that begins.

It seems the issue is exclusive to iCloud. I can reproduce the issue wth multiple iPads and iPhones, each with their own iCloud accounts. I've tried multiple routers (and multiple ISPs!) but the issue persists. As I said, this issue only started for the first time just a couple of months ago, so I don't believe that this is expected behavior from iOS or iCloud. But I can't isolate the issue to anything on my network, so I'm starting to suspect it's an issue with iCloud. But if that's the case, why hasn't it been more reported upon?

Any help or suggestions are greatly appreciated.