Data Sense: "Restore Data" is running wild!?!?

[RJ Priest]

Lumia 1520 running Windows Phone 8.1

For the last three weeks, my phone has suddenly been burning through my data plan. In Data Sense, the culprit is "Restore Data".

At the end of my last month, Restore Data had used over 400mb of cellular data and drove me to my 1gig limit for the first time ever. It didn't come to my attention until my 1520 prompted me with a warning that I was on the verge of exceeding my data limit.

After two restarts, this new phenomena is continuing. I have restricted all background data use, which stops Restore Data from continuing to drain data over cellular, but if I'm on WiFi, it continues this behavior using WiFi data.

In 12 days, Restore Data has used 61mb of cellular (before I restricted background data), and 840mb of WiFi data (which would have been almost all of my cellular data if I hadn't restricted celluar). In the last 24 hours, it has used 67mb over WiFi.

The only app update prior to this problem was Weather on November 24th, and weather is only showing <1mb of data use in Data Sense.

Could this be a Microsoft "back end" change at some point in December, affecting Windows Phone 8.1?

Does anyone know exactly what "Restore Data" is doing?

Is anyone experiencing this problem? Restricting all background data is a poor stop-gap measure because I no longer receive email or social media notifications unless I'm on WiFi.

 

[Tejas Javery]

Lumia 1520 running Windows Phone 8.1

For the last three weeks, my phone has suddenly been burning through my data plan. In Data Sense, the culprit is "Restore Data".

At the end of my last month, Restore Data had used over 400mb of cellular data and drove me to my 1gig limit for the first time ever. It didn't come to my attention until my 1520 prompted me with a warning that I was on the verge of exceeding my data limit.

After two restarts, this new phenomena is continuing. I have restricted all background data use, which stops Restore Data from continuing to drain data over cellular, but if I'm on WiFi, it continues this behavior using WiFi data.

In 12 days, Restore Data has used 61mb of cellular (before I restricted background data), and 840mb of WiFi data (which would have been almost all of my cellular data if I hadn't restricted celluar). In the last 24 hours, it has used 67mb over WiFi.

The only app update prior to this problem was Weather on November 24th, and weather is only showing <1mb of data use in Data Sense.

Could this be a Microsoft "back end" change at some point in December, affecting Windows Phone 8.1?

Does anyone know exactly what "Restore Data" is doing?

Is anyone experiencing this problem? Restricting all background data is a poor stop-gap measure because I no longer receive email or social media notifications unless I'm on WiFi.

can you tell me what app takes up most of your data? I mean you can check it in that data sense thing.
also, I would suggest you turn the automatic update feature off on the windows store. who knows, it might just be updating apps in the background.

and had you anytime recent reset your phone or something? restoring data could be that. it might just be restoring your data from backup somewhere.
there are quite a lot of possibilities. also, considered switching to windows 10? it ain' that bad you know...

 

[RJ Priest]

Thank you for responding.

The app listed in data sense which takes up the most data is "Restore Data".

No single real app is using any significant amount of data.

Automatic update has always been disabled. I've always liked seeing the store tile get a number of app updates to manually install.

I have not reset or restored my phone.

This issue is very strange. Like I said, started doing this toward the end of December.

 

[RJ Priest]

A quick follow-up:

At some point last week, this problem appears to have been corrected. I remain convinced that it was a "back end" problem for Microsoft.

I had also noticed this problem with my sim-less ATIV S, and over WiFi, it was doing the same thing, gobbling up "Data to Restore", but then both phones stopped last week.

At the time this stopped last week, my 1520 had used 1.17gb of "Restore Data" over WiFi in data sense. Since last week, it's only gone from 1.17 to 1.19, where as it would likely be close to 2gb if the problem was persisting.

Note that on Lumia 1520, this is called "Restore Data" in the Data Sense app list, and on ATIV S, it is "Data to Restore".

I have a series of Data Sense screenshots that I could post if needed.