Scan Local Drives - Does it Pick up where it left off, or do you have to start all over again?

Hello, John,

                      I am using the free version for Mac. I ran the "scan local drives" - "scan all files & folders on this mac" last week for the first time & it told me there were 3 million plus items.

I started the scan at 1208 & it finished at 2111 with the message " no theats detected"

Good Luck

Malcolm Dale 

Melbourne Australia

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corcoraniii wrote:

I started the "Scan Local Drives" several times over the year since I purchased it, but never had days and days to let it finish.  Does it pick up where it left off when you quit or shut down the machine, or does it start all over again from the begining when I start Scan Local Drives again after the machine is restarted?

If I am going to have to leave my machine on for several days and nights to complete the scan, the software is impractical and of little use.

I started the scan this morning (about 9:00 am) and it is now 4:30 pm.  It looks like it is 1/10th done.  Is this normal?  If it is, how do I get my money back?

John Corcoran

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It does not pick up where you left off, as it has no way to tell what has changed in the file contents until it has examined them (as some viruses don't modify the metadata when they infect files).

If you're doing that kind of scan, it would probably be better to create a set of custom scans that scan segments of your computer, and run them one at a time.

If you have a lot of large archives, the progress bar will stall while inside them, and then zip along when the archive is scanned and it is only looking at regular files.  It usually takes about 10 hours for my personal "Scan Local Drives" scan to complete on my home computer.

HOWEVER

Sophos Anti-Virus is not meant to be used as primarily an on-demand scanner.  It's a "live" scanner that scans your files as you use them; the "scan local drives" option is mostly there to do an initial scan of your system, and to do a more in-depth scan if you've excluded files or file types in your on-access scans.

Getting your money back: I truly hope you didn't give anyone money for our free product; it shouldn't even require registration from Sophos to use it (despite using the same scan data as our enterprise product).