nsurlsessiond and cloudd: sending gigabytes to gcs-us-00001.storage.googleapis.com

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50 points

nsurlsessiond and cloudd: sending gigabytes to gcs-us-00001.storage.googleapis.com

I've been watching my internet bandwidth eat through its quota quickly after recently upgrading to a new iMac (2015 5K 27"). OS X 10.11.1

While I'm still trying to figure out why icloud photo library is trying to reupload my whole large library (discussion in another thread), I turned on Little Snitch to see what else is eating my bandwidth.

Little Snitch is showing that both nsurlsessiond and cloudd are sending gigabytes of information uploading to gcs-us-00001.storage.googleapis.com. In the screenshots from Little Snitch, it's after a reboot, and I have those addresses disabled (listed in red below) until I figure out what they are doing so they show no data yet, but prior to this, these processes together happily sent >15 gigabytes since last night to gcs-us-00001.storage.googleapis.com.

While I know these deamons are used by iCloud for its sync services, including the icloud library, I'm not aware that Apple would use a google storage url? Other addresses these deamons are accessing are what I'd expect -- they have "icloud" in their domain names.

I DO have Google Photos on my system, but it reports that it's finished uploading its files. Little Snitch reports Google Photos Backup accessing these servers:

The only other app that I have running in the background that might well consume lots of data is Crashplan:

It seems to me some sort of backup service is doing this, but I hope there's not some sort of leeching app doing nefarious things. Has anyone seen or know what app might be accessing gcs-us-00001.storage.googleapis.com via nsurlsessiond and cloudd?

Thanks...

iMac with Retina 5K display, OS X El Capitan (10.11.1), Late 2015 27"

Posted on Nov 16, 2015 8:42 PM

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Answer 1

pmod

Level 1

20 points

Dec 5, 2015 10:45 AM in response to SteveW25561

iCloud uses cloud computing resources from both Google & Amazon Web Services -- this is the Photos library doing its normal thing.

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Answer 2

Nov 16, 2015 11:03 PM in response to SteveW25561

You have probably turned on iCloud Photo Library which uploads your entire library and makes it available to all of your devices. Check in System Settings > iCloud and click the Options button next to Photos. If you don't want to use iCloud Photo Library, be sure that options is not ticked.

The Google url is not related. You may also have Picassa running a similar task.

You must also have installed and are running Crashplan. Being a backup serve, it uploads your data to the cloud.

All of these can represent a huge amount of upload data.

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Answer 3

SteveW25561 Author

Level 1

50 points

Nov 17, 2015 12:16 AM in response to Alfred DeRose

Thanks for the reply: I definitely want icloud photo library, but it's inexplicably trying to reupload the whole library (I'm trying to find out why in a separate thread) -- the Photos library was migrated over from my prior Mac, and that one had already synced the whole library to iCloud. I just want it fully functional with local originals, as intended.

I also know Crashplan will use up a huge chunk of data, but again, I'm expecting this. Little Snitch indicates it is using crashplan.com servers, again expected.

What I can't figure out is what program is using more data than either Photos or Crashplan, and uses these deamons to access the gcs-us-00001.storage.googleapis.com. I don't have Picasa or Google Drive installed: the only Google products is Google Photo backup.

I'll write the Crashplan guys to find out if they use that url and report back. Any other ideas?

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