![]() You're at a remote hotel or coffee shop, you have to get some work done, the free wifi is unusable, and all you can do is tether to your mobile hotspot, on a prepaid SIM card whose data cap is within sight, and whose internet connection is stumbling along at under a megabit. ![]() However, for constant travelers (including, but not limited to, digital nomads)-particularly in less connected areas, like outside urban areas in Asia or Africa-you start to think about this more. If there's a resource that the average consumer literally *never* contemplates conserving, it's the internet bandwidth that you're normally gulping while sitting in front of your laptop. Well, why would you? Over-consumption (in this context) doesn't cost you, does it? In the vast majority of cases, gulping by the GB doesn't perceivably cost you more than sipping a few MB here and there. And while this may conceivably change somewhat in the future (given the controversy around net neutrality in the States and worldwide), it's difficult to imagine bandwidth conservation efforts (with respect to desktop computing) ever really piercing the mainstream consciousness. If you're just here for the action items, and already understand how/why you might ever need to conserve bandwidth: purchase and install an app called TripMode (on either Mac OS or Windows), and use it to nimbly and granularly control (by whitelist) which apps can access the internet at any given time. But for constant travelers like my family and me, it's a core part of the toolkit. ![]() There's also an issue with some applications sneaking around the back of this firewall using Host Process for Windows Services.The use case for TripMode, a bandwidth conservation utility, is a counterintuitive one, for most computer users. The only problem (and the reason I'm keeping this question open) is that there's a risk you might allow Dropbox to access data while unmetered, and forget to turn it off before going metered again - in which case you wouldn't know Dropbox was gourging itself on expensive metered data until either it popped up a notice to tell you it had finished, or, you happened to look at Glasswire's usage screen. Glasswire starts automatically and remembers your settings, so you can turn Dropbox off once and forget about it until you're on an unmetered connection. Turning Dropbox on and off is as simple as toggling this fire icon on the "firewall" tab, which lists every application that ever ate your data (and therefore also lets you shut off other troublesome data hogs, and spot data hogs you didn't know you had): Glasswire is really easy to use and useful for conserving data because it shows you what is using how much data and where, and lets you shut off individual programs' access to the internet: ![]() My current "brute force" approach is using the free firewall program Glasswire. However this is open to user error (I could easily forget to untick this when I finish using unmetered wifi), and some applications sneak past firewalls like this by running as a service and pigbacking on "Host process for Windows services", so it's not foolproof. My current workaround is to use a firewall that monitors data usage (I'm using Glasswire, which is really easy to use), and forbid dropbox from using the network until I manually re-allow it. I've tried disabling DropBox from auto-starting by unticking Start dropbox on system startup in dropbox preferences, but DropBox then still likes to start up uninvited when I connect anyway, quietly appearing in the system tray quietly downloading gigabytes. I've seen a possible option here, on a question that is similar but is not specific to DropBox or to wireless metered connections, but that only works for that user because (unlike me) their metered connections are also all cable/LAN connections. Using software more modern and respectful of user choices than Dropbox isn't practical in the short term because I'm on many shared family, work and other folders shared with many people - too many people would have to change. Even though I've set my Mifi connection to "metered", DropBox thinks nothing of quietly burning my entire data allowance downloading things I could wait for ab unmetered connection to download.ĭropBox also has no "pause and stay paused until unpause" feature I can find. Unfortunately, the DropBox desktop application is one of those applications that does not respect the Windows "Metered connection" setting. I use a wireless "Mifi" metered internet connection at home and while traveling on a laptop I periodically also use on various unmetered wireless connections. ![]()
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