Why is my internet crawling every time I leave SolidWorks open?

That steady evening upload is exactly what I ran into with my own trial, and it's not some sync or backup feature you missed in the settings. The app quietly scans your drives for CAD files, sorts them into little buckets it calls projects, and pushes them up to their cloud storage. What made it obvious to me was the timing: the traffic got noticeably heavier when I locked my screen and walked away, becasue the throttling only kicks in while you're actively using the machine. They ship more when nobody's watching. There's also an interaction data collection setting flipped on by default, screenshots included, so even if you never feed it a file it's still sending something up. To see what it's actualy moving, open Resource Monitor on Windows and check the Network tab. Sort by the process name and you'll see the destination addresses it's talking to and roughly how much it's pushed. That's how I confirmed mine was hitting one of their endpoints nonstop instead of just phoning home occasionally.

The account-level flag controls it, not anything in the app, so you can't switch it off locally. What I did instead was add an outbound block rule for that program in Windows Defender Firewall. Side effect is the AI part stops responding entirely, since the actual thinking happens on their servers, but the SolidWorks side stays untouched. For finishing a trial that's a pretty clear signal about where the value is. On the terms, yeah, read them now. There's a clause buried in there about uploaded content being used to improve their services, which is lawyer language for your models becoming their training material. And worth thinking about: if any of those assemblies touch client work, shipping them to a third party cloud is probly an NDA problem whether you meant to or not. I cut my trial short and uninstalled after figuring all this out.

I'm not even on SolidWorks, I'm a hobbyist messing around in AutoCAD, but this got me checking my own machine and now I'm paranoid about stuff I installed months ago. Question I can't find an answer to: does the scanning hit external drives too? I keep older client drawings on a portable USB drive that's ussually unplugged, but it was connected that first week I tried the trial. If it grabbed those I'd honestly have no idea what to do about it, like is there even a way to see what's sitting in their cloud and ask them to wipe it? Feels like that part matters more than the upload speed itself.

This makes me wonder about the stuff that allready got sent up. I installed a similar trial a couple months back, never thougth twice about it, and now I'm guessing my drawings have been sitting on someone else's servers this whole time. Is there a way to get files deleted from their end after the fact, or do they just keep everything once it's up there? I'd ask their support but something tells me they won't be super helpful about it.

One thing I'd add from my own week with it: killing the tray process doesn't actually stop anything permanent, because the installer registers a background service that relaunches the agent after a reboot or even after a few minutes idle. I watched mine come back twice before I checked services.msc and found it set to automatic. Also, on the file question, remember a SolidWorks assembly references external part and drawing files by path, so even if you only ever opened one assembly during the trial, everything it points to is fair game for the scanner. Worth mapping out which folders those referenced files actually live in before deciding how bad the exposure is.