![]() However, most of these quibbles were off by 10% or so, not the orders of magnitude I was seeing. I also found numerous people online complaining that their usage meter did not match their self-evaluated usage (some measured using tools such as using Gargoyle firmware on their router). By the end of figuring all this out, I actually found their usage meter to be accurate in realtime, but others online report usage changing after the fact. They have a disclaimer on the meter saying it is “delayed by up to 24 hours” (and on the phone I was told it could lag for weeks). When trying to use the meter to diagnose bandwidth issues, Comcast itself says it should not be relied on. With no obvious culprits on my network, it seemed suspicious for me to be exceeding my cap just as they introduce caps, so my attention turned to whether Comcast’s usage reporting was accurate.Ĭomcast gets a lot of heat for their data caps, and in particular for their usage meter accuracy. I was completely baffled – nothing else was being generated by the Mac Mini, and the amount of data uploaded by the Dropcam was also minimal, yet each day it kept increasing. I used Activity Monitor to keep a track of how much bandwidth each process was using on the server, and saw BackBlaze (bztransmit) had transmitted ~50gb, but my uptime was 3 weeks at that point, and so that seemed about right. I checked remotely to ensure there were no other wireless clients running on my network, but couldn’t see anything. I had a left my Mac Mini server running, a Dropcam, and a Nest and that was it. While I was away, each day I saw my data continue to increase by approximately 80gb a day. I was about to head overseas for 8 days so I decided to shut everything down while I was away and figure out what was using the data once I got back. This was surprising in two ways – one, I didn’t expect Comcast to hijack an http request to do this, and two, it was saying I’d used over 900gb of data in just over a week. In the second week of November 2016 I got a notification in my browser telling me I’d used 90% of my cap. ![]() ![]() This is a pretty consumer-unfriendly move, and being in California this meant this was happening to me – but personally I had never come close to exceeding the cap, so wasn’t overly worried (and won’t be until 4K video becomes more common). I’ve switched to CrashPlan, which has better retention, encryption, and backup policies.īeyond sharing this warning, I wanted to do a longer write-up of what I experienced because I found some pretty interesting things along the way – how to get true visibility into what’s happening on your local network, what’s up with Comcast’s usage meter, and what happens when something goes wrong with offsite backup with BackBlaze.Įarlier in the year Comcast announced they were introducing 1 terabyte data caps in 27 markets across the US (of which 18 previously did not have enforced caps). Tl dr: if you use BackBlaze and are subject to a data cap, you should keep an eye on BackBlaze to make sure it doesn’t quietly use up all your data allowance.
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