One Drive ate up my NBN allowance

A few days ago I got a message from my telco (Telstra) that I had exceeded my 500GB monthly NBN allowance - not something I ever expected to happen. 

Several hours later my learning can be summarised as follows:

• Pay attention to notices from my telco - I got an 85% warning a few days earlier
• Having your NBN speed lowered to 256kbps focusses the mind
• My telco has very useful NBN analytics
• Windows 10 has a useful Data Usage tab
• One Drive needs to be carefully configured
• My telco has much improved customer service
• I probably don't need a 500GB monthly data allowance - it was a special NBN deal  :-)

The following NBN data usage analytics from my telco clearly showed a dramatic change on 20 Dec 2016 and that uploads were the principal problem.

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Consulting Google I learned that Windows 10 Settings --> Data Usage can be very helpful.

Windows desktop data usage for the last 30 days was 397GB!

Usage details for the last 30 days on my Windows desktop led to:

A similar situation was found on my Windows 10 laptop.

I use Dropbox extensively and hardly use One Drive at all - or so I thought...

More Googling revealed that I need to be much more careful with my One Drive settings.

My response - possibly an over-reaction - was to unlink One Drive for home and work and not use it again until it behaves itself.

My telco generously allows 3 monthly allowance resets a year so once I had found the problem I initiated one. I was also able to use fast call back (no phone queues) to cancel my data usage inquiry after logging the issue with tech support. I got a call back in 2 mins - exceptional service.

I have no idea what happened on 20 December to trigger the poor One Drive behaviour but it won't impact my NBN allowance again  :-)

As you can see all back to normal now:

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