Items downloading in background on iPhone

[BsFaninCGY]

Yesterday I got a new iPhone 6S using the Apple Care replacement program and brought it home to restore from iCloud on my home wifi. I started in the early afternoon and was home until 6am this morning when I hit the road to drive out to Lake Louise.

Around lunch time today I got a notification that I had exceeded my data plan and had racked up a bill of $50, and that my data was blocked temporarily.

As far as I can figure, this data usage came from the Music app on my phone. I opened the app for the first time as we hit the road, and it immediately starting rebuilding my playlists. It didn't take long, and once complete I played music for the full 2+ hour drive.

I subscribe to iTunes match, so my entire library is available to me. However, for times when I am in airplane mode or travelling through poor cell areas, I have a lot of music downloaded directly to my device (10GB's?). I guess it was re-downloading these files starting when I first opened the app out in my driveway, and continued until it used up all my data.

I'm back home now, back on wifi, and wondering how to fix this so it doesn't happen again tomorrow when I'm on cell data. Yes, the easy answer it to turn off cell data, but I don't want to do that. I have a lot of apps on my phone - do I need to open each one to start any re-downloading it must do? How can I be sure when it's done and won't be doing anything in the background - both the music app and any others? How do I get Music to download all the music back onto my phone while I'm home on wifi?

[GGG]

Go into settings under cellular And turn off data for the specific app.

So I have The App Store, iTunes, and podcasts set to not use data.

[BsFaninCGY]

I'm ok with using cell data in normal circumstances - I just don't want to re-download every single thing while on cellular. I guess my long-winded question is how do I ensure everything that was on my phone before (on all apps) is downloaded before heading back out into the wild?

[Wormius]

It depends on what you have set up to backup on your iCloud account.

For next time, backup your phone through your PC with iTunes and then restore from that backup file instead of via iCloud. That file the iTunes backup creates should be an exact replica of everything on your phone, as opposed to the iCloud backup with is essentially user settings and a list of things to download at its convenience.

[topfiverecords]

Loading from an iTunes backup didn't bring my music over when I did it on my new phone last week. It listed all my albums but I had to manually re-download each album.

I'm glad mine didn't auto download like the OP because I was on the road for hours as well when I first opened music. I just used a bit of data to grab the few albums that would tide me over until I could download the rest on wifi.