Help! Sophos is eating my hard drive space!

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makdm wrote:

I installed Sophos tonight and although it has worked fine on my other hard drives, it continues to choke on a portable Verbatim 500 GB Firewire 800 drive.  It always stalls at the same point, but the computer continues to write something to my internal hard drive.  I'm watching my hard drive space get eaten up from 120 gigs or so free all the way down to nothing zero K available!  What is going on?  Is there some sort of writing to a "scratch disk" happening?  Why has the custom scan stopped but the drive space continues to get eaten up?  Why is it even eating up space in the first place-- that doesn't seem right?  It did not do this when dealing with any of the other drives as far as I could tell.  

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It's writing to virtual memory because it is having to decompress all of your archives and store that data somewhere.  OS X stores virtual (swap) memory in multiple sparse files; when one fills up, it creates another and keeps going.

To recover this space, restart your computer and the OS will toss all the unneeded files.

If you check your scan log, you will likely find that SAV is "stalling" on some sort of large archive (zip or rar file, dmg file, jar app, etc).  The progress bar does not progress while the contents of these files are extracted to virtual memory and then scanned.  To avoid this issue, you can either exclude the file (and scan it seperately) or temporarily disable "scan inside archives".

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makdm wrote:

I installed Sophos tonight and although it has worked fine on my other hard drives, it continues to choke on a portable Verbatim 500 GB Firewire 800 drive.  It always stalls at the same point, but the computer continues to write something to my internal hard drive.  I'm watching my hard drive space get eaten up from 120 gigs or so free all the way down to nothing zero K available!  What is going on?  Is there some sort of writing to a "scratch disk" happening?  Why has the custom scan stopped but the drive space continues to get eaten up?  Why is it even eating up space in the first place-- that doesn't seem right?  It did not do this when dealing with any of the other drives as far as I could tell.  

---

It's writing to virtual memory because it is having to decompress all of your archives and store that data somewhere.  OS X stores virtual (swap) memory in multiple sparse files; when one fills up, it creates another and keeps going.

To recover this space, restart your computer and the OS will toss all the unneeded files.

If you check your scan log, you will likely find that SAV is "stalling" on some sort of large archive (zip or rar file, dmg file, jar app, etc).  The progress bar does not progress while the contents of these files are extracted to virtual memory and then scanned.  To avoid this issue, you can either exclude the file (and scan it seperately) or temporarily disable "scan inside archives".