Mac going wild downloading on Exede measured satellite Internet

[Marc Stump]

Hi,
With our Exede Internet we are limited to 10 gig per month. The last two days have been weird because there have been "
blasts' of downloading with our Mac El Capitan. We have a net montoring program on it, and I mean that in less than 3 minutes it showed 366 meg download and 625 meg upload. Exede counts both uploads and downloads and that is 1/10 of our monthly allotment tin less than 3 minutes!
Scanned for viruses with clamxav and didn't find anything. Have Little Snitch installed and created a profile that lets only Firefox, email, and protected system processes through.
I have turned off automatic updates. That would have been the only thing that could have downloaded such a massive amount, but know o0f no way to check.
Right now I keep Mac unplugged from modem until I need to check email only.
Anyone have any suggestions?
Thanks.

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello and welcome.

That does sound excessive, but it also sounds like something else is using the bandwidth. There was a recent El Capitan update which could have been downloading in the background. If you have turned off automatic updates, then that shouldn't happen unless you specifically check and request the updates. You could also disable all automatic updates for other software, including Microsoft, Adobe, etc. In addition, make sure that iTunes isn't setup to automatically download purchases (music/apps/movies/etc.) from other devices.

You should be OK, and I would suggest monitoring it to see if you have any additional excessive activity.

C