Home Mac Edition Scan cuts out?

Hi Sebastien,

You could take a look at the scan log, that might offer some insight as to why the scan is stopping. You can access that by clicking the sophos icon, then selecting 'scans' and clicking the little cog icon. 

it says under the scan log that the number of items completed are 551,865

under "Scan items" its blank (not sure if that has to do with anything)

the number of items it counts before a scan is in the 600,000+range (not sure of the exact number)

still unsure why those last 100,000+ are cut off at the end of the scan

Hey, sorry for the slow reply. 

So, "Scan Items" will be blank if you're running the default scan. If you were to run a custom scan, the "Scan items" would include a list of the items included in the scan. 

As for your question, just curious where do you get the 600000 number? Can you copy / paste a screenshot of this, as well as the results of the scan log into your reply?

Just as an example, this is what one of mine looks like:

===========================================

Scan name: "Scan Local Drives"
Scan items:
Configuration:
Scan inside archives and compressed files: Yes
Automatically clean up threats: No
Action on infected files: Report only
Live Protection enabled: Yes

Scan started at 2015-06-23 12:08:52 -0700

New volume detected at /
2015-06-23 12:40:43 -0700 Threat component: 'EICAR-AV-Test' in /Users/eleanor/Downloads/eicar.com-2.txt
2015-06-23 12:40:43 -0700 Threat component: 'EICAR-AV-Test' in /Users/eleanor/Downloads/eicar.com.txt
2015-06-23 12:40:43 -0700 Threat: 'EICAR-AV-Test' detected

Scan completed at 2015-06-23 12:40:43 -0700.
378959 items scanned, 1 threats detected, 0 issues

===========================================

From this log we see the total number of files scanned was 378959. Just to make sure this was the correct number, I opened up terminal and ran the following command, which takes a while to complete, but goes through and counts all the files on the system. The resulting number is actually a bit lower than the number of files scanned by sophos, because I think the find command can't traverse through some of the system files - but Sophos definitely scanned them all.

Eleanor:/ serra$ sudo find . -type f | wc -l 

find: ./dev/fd/3: Not a directory 

find: ./dev/fd/4: Not a directory 

find: ./Volumes/VMware Shared Folders: Input/output error 

377228 

Hopefully that helps answer some of your question, but if you're still unsure please let me know!

alright im gonna go step-by-step to show what im talking about here

i click the shield in my menubar and select "Scan This Mac"; from there i get this (the items where larger than usual for some reason)

it scans and usually cuts off somewhere in the 100,000 range

i checked the scan log and got this 

the numbers are off by around 162181 items

 any ideas?

EDIT:

also these are my prefrences for sophos under On-Access

not sure if those two unchecked boxes for "scan" have something to do with it or not

Hi Sebastian,

Sorry for the slow reply on this, and thanks for the screenshots. 

-  Regarding the last screenshot you shared - these are the preferences for on access scanning, which is different than the on demand scans you are running. Just to clarify - On Access means every time you access a file (by opening it or running it, if it's an application) the file is scanned by SAV. On Demand is when you manually run the scan by using the Scan This Mac command. So to answer your question, these settings don't have anything to do with the On demand scans you're running.

As for the file count you're concerned about. If SAV is going to do an On Demand scan of the entire disk, it asks the OS how many files are contained on the disk (it knows, and is accurate.) However, in the scan report we only report the actual number of files we scanned. There are a few reasons why these numbers would vary. The first is exclusions, which is a setting manually controlled by you, which I'll explain in a minute. Some other reasons would include: We don't scan files that are cached for future time machine backups. We don't scan special system files (e.g. those contained under /dev). The scan is also run under the permissions of the user who launched the scan, so if there are other users on the Mac, there may be files your user account doesn't have access to, so they won't be included in the scan.

Exclusions: I'm *guessing* you don't have these configured, but you can set your on-demand scans to skip certain areas on disk by going into the "Scans" menu, right clicking the white area and going into "Scan Settings..." Under the exclusiobs tab you can tell the scanner to skip any directories you don't want scanned. Within the scan settings menu under Options you will also see a similar setting to the ones you were asking about in the final screenshot in your last post - Scan inside archives and compressed files. If you have this checked, the scan will do just that. If not, scanner will skip these files. 

Ok, I hope that makes sense, and sorry about the wall of text!

now that you mentioned it i do remember that when i run the "Scan This Mac" it shows certain files in the lower right corner popping up and a certain amount were /dev ones (with a few exceptions); i guess they got skipped 

Thanks for helping serra

No worries! Glad I was able to help! :catvery-happy: