I have been evaluating Sophos with the intention of buying a 5 license version of the small business edition. However, somehow I ended up downloading the free version of the home edition rather than the small business edition.
I've had various problems - firstly, running it on my 2011 MacBook Pro with 7200 rpm hard drive and only has 260 of 670GB used - yet the disk scan seems to take forever (in the realm of 24hrs to get half way). This was with the Mac set to never sleep.
When I did on a repeat attempt tell the Mac to sleep the file count didn't reduce after waking.
I also had an issue where it found a trojan in an email attachment (from an email I had sent for analysis) - it couldn't remove the file and told me to remove it manually, which I did (using Time MAchine to select delete all backups of that file). However after that the scan file count didn't go down at all. I also found that after quitting Sophos Antivirus and relaunching it it still told me there was a trojan - I checked, it was gone, trash was empty, I cleared the item from the quarrantine list, quit and relaunched, and it was back again.
Looking in the logs, the most recent items it was scanning were items I started to download but then cancelled - and it reported them as being corrupt (and perhaps this was causing it to get stuck or run very slowly???). There certainly shouldn't have been anything suspicious about those files as they were 1) Lion installer from the Mac app store and 2) the Windows trial version of Sophos that I had accidentally started downloading on my Mac instead of within VMWare fusion.
Now - given that I was trying to evaluate this software to buy, I'm not very impressed at all with it's lack of stabilty. The last time I ran antivirus was when Apple included VirusBarrier X5 with .Mac subscriptions. That used to crash my Mac so I removed it and haven't used antivirus software since on my Mac (have successfully used McAfee Total Protection in Windows).
I contacted support at Sophos - and despite repeatedly asking if (apart from the licensing terms) there was a difference between the Mac SBE and Mac Home Edition - none of the replies would confirm or deny this. If the Mac SBE is effectively the same - then I can assume that these problems would be faced with the paid version too. They also said I would have to come to these forums to get support (even those I made it clear I was trying to evaluate the software in perparation for purchasing it for 5 machines).
This testing was on my MacBook Pro - which has a relatively clean recent installation of everything, and has nothing too critical on it. My first experiences of Sophos means there is no way I'd even want to test it on my Mac Pro.
Unfortunately we need antivirus software for PCI compliance, and McAfee Total Protection isn't up to standard because it only keeps 30 days of scanning logs.
Basically writing this here because at least it seems that Sophos do monitor these forums - so even though my initial experiences have been quite bad (I didn't even mention the fact that while installing Sophos in VMWare Fusion/Windows XP while running the Disk Scan in Mac OS it caused my Mac Pro to completely freeze) - maybe these are issues that with the right support and bug fixes could be fixed?
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