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My Boot Disk is Full......Yet Again!

Fotomann

I have just un-installed my Sophos AntiVirus for Mac as every time I run a full scan on my multi-drive MacBook this application fills my boot disk and locks the system, requiring it to be powered down by holding down the power switch. Thankfully my MacBook does lock up, thus preventing my data from being corrupted.

It's a shame that this otherwise excellent AV application is spoiled by a simple to fix bug such as this in the software. So I suppose it will be back to Kaspersky!

:1002297


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  • 0

    Uncheck "scan inside archives and compressed files" and you will no longer run out of space as your archives are decompressed to disk.  I hope this helps.

    :1002307
  • 0

    As ALL my work files from the outside world arrive in a compressed format, telling my AV application to ignore them is defeating the whole object of having AV software in the first place. What sort of an idiotic suggestion is that?

    If Sophos AV is incapable of correctly scanning files in a compressed format, free or not, it should not be advertised as an AV application - even PC Tools iAntiVirus for Mac can scan HUGE compressed files without screwing up a system. Why can't Sophos just fix this bug and give the Mac World the superb application this software should be: even your latest "fixes" haven't addressed this fault.

    :1002311
  • 0

    Hello Fotomann,

    a full scan is just that - a full scan. While it should be performed on a regular basis it is not the - if I may say so - pivotal feature. As long as a threat is packed in an archive it can't do anything. It has to be unpacked first and then accessed in order to execute and on-access scanning  will catch it at this point. So the contents of an archive are "ignored" but only as long as you don't unpack them (provided, of course, that you didn't turn off on-access scanning - which you shouldn't do). 

    You could perform an in-depth scan on incoming archives with a Finder scan if you want but with on-access active this is not really necessary.

    HTH

    Christian

    :1002323
  • 0

    What I've done on my own Macs is set up on-access with archive scanning off, and then used my folder action script (available in another thread) to do archive scanning on select folders when the contents change.  Those folders include my Mail folder and my Shared folder -- that way, I get the best of both worlds.

    :1002325
  • 0
    I've had the same problem. I'm not sure how I have enough compressed files on my boot drive to fill all 38GB of free space.

    But my primary concern is that my boot drive is an SSD, and stuffing it up with a bunch of temporary files probably isn't good for its life expectancy. Sophos needs to recognize SSDs and copy the uncompressed stuff to a HDD (if available) which can handle repeated file writes better.
  • 0
    Since decompressing compressed files is necessary to allow scanning, if the Mac has sufficient RAM to hold the decompressed file, can it be scanned there rather than first being written to disk?
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