Automatic Backups & Downloads

Most activities on a modern smartphone will consume data, especially automatic backups and downloads, the exceptions being making a phone call, sending a text message, which are charged separately.

Activities which consume data include browsing the web, reading and sending e-mails, browsing Facebook and Twitter, sharing photos, downloading applications, voice-over-IP, Personal Hotspot and instant messaging applications.

Please note that your phone may consume data in the background even when you’re not using it. For example, the weather widget on your home screen will update itself periodically by downloading the latest forecast from the internet. Your e-mail application will also check for new messages periodically.

We have no way of knowing how much you will use and it is entirely your responsibility to understand and monitor your usage and check what automatic backups and downloads are enabled.

Web pages differ in size depending on the amount of text, images and other multimedia content on it. Also, whilst most e-mail messages are typically small in size, they can be fairly large if they include attachments such as photographs.

Here are some useful sections for each operating system to enable or disable automatic backups and downloads.