Home Mac Edition Scan cuts out?

Question

hi im kinda new to the community so please go easy on me here...

I have the Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac, the free home edition. Whenever i decide to do a scan on my mac it always seems to cut off the last 100,000 or so items when its scanning. It says that no threats were found and no issues were detected but why werent those last 100,000 items scanned? Are they files that cant be scanned or are they programs that i never used?

Can anyone figure this out for me please

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serra · Accepted Answer

Hi Sebastian,

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

- Regarding t he 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 - O n 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! :1021137