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Box Drive using a huge amount of internet data

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Maggie Waller

I installed Box Drive and have been using Box on desktop and it appears to be using a huge amount of my internet data allowance, so much so that I went over the use limit this month, which has never happened before (I've only used up to 60% previously). After speaking with my ISP, it appeared that the days I was using Box were tied to the high use days of data. I uninstalled and reinstalled the Box Drive app and will monitor the usage in the coming days, but is there any reason this may be happening or any way to prevent it? My collaborators don't seem to have this issue. Thanks!

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  • France

    Hi Maggie, 

    Welcome to the Box Community, I'm happy to help!

    I understand that it may appear that Box Drive is using a huge amount of my internet data on your device. We have seen situation like this when there's an application that could be "crawling the Box Drive mount point" - that means an app is trying to find and read every file in the local Box folder, which forces Box Drive to fetch the entire Box file and folder hierarchy and possibly every file's contents from Box.com.

    We also call this problem internally "runaway hydration". Common apps that do this are antivirus tools, enterprise IT device management apps, viruses and other malware, and badly written custom IT scripts. Box Drive actively blocks most antivirus and device management apps that we at Box see causing this problem, but inevitably we miss some. And of course, we can't block viruses, nor can we block custom scripts without going too far by blocking the scripting languages themselves.

    Hope this information helps! Thanks for posting and let us know how else we can help!
     
    Regards, 
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  • Maggie Waller

    Hi France, thank you so much for your reply. I am on a Mac M1 chip machine and don't use any of the software you mentioned, and I ran a search for malware without finding anything, so please do let me know if you have any other suggestions or thoughts on this! 

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  • Office Manager (Account Administrator)

    Just donated my 6 year old iMac to the office and the same thing happened.  Computer was wiped clean before installing box sync.  Blew through our internet data in about a week.  Have been using my phone's personal hotspot and that looks like it will only last another day.  Really need some info on how to solve this problem.

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