Is support for Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac going to be discontinued soon?

Support for Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac Home Edition 9.4.2 has been discontinued for Snow Leopard/10.6 and Lion 10.7. If you are running an OS above either of these, the 9.4.2 should automatically update to the current 9.5.2.

Note: I've found that after updating, a restart was needed to get it working.

See community.sophos.com/.../77784

Hi BRVX,

Thanks for your reply, and it's reassuring that Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac Home Edition isn't being discontinued.  I'm running on El Capitan 10.11.6 at the moment, and 'Sophos Anti-Virus' works fine.  I've re-started the Mac today, but Sophos hasn't been updated to 9.5.2, but I see from your link (thank you) that 9.5.2 is only a 'preview' and is only being offered to 'willing volunteers'.

I've also tried the new 'Sophos Home', but it just doesn't have the features of 'Sophos Anti-Virus', and I think I would change to an entirely different developer (maybe Avast), if I was forced to change to 'Sophos Home' at the moment.  Once it's got some more usual features, then maybe I might be willing to change, but 'Sophos Anti-Virus' does everything I want at the moment, and does it faultlessly.

Maybe I'l test  the new 9.5.2 preview on a spare drive, to see if I like it.  Hopefully, Sophos will get that working fully soon, and then we'll all be updated automatically.

Thanks again for your input.

No, the 9.5.2 is not the preview. As far as I know, it's the version that went automatically live to everyone running 10.8 and above, at the beginning of August. Updating (and then restarting, in my case, at least) should bring it in. The 9.5.0 was the preview/beta version which needed to be manually installed.

brvx said:

No, the 9.5.2 is not the preview. As far as I know, it's the version that went automatically live to everyone running 10.8 and above, at the beginning of August...

Bob Cook said 8/11 that "We published an update to the Preview build (9.5.2) today. If you have previously installed the Preview, your software should automatically update." I'm still running Sophos 9.4.2 on my production Mac but a test Mac was upgraded from Preview 9.5.0 to 9.5.2 as he described.

Thought is was going to all endpoints at the beginning 8/16. So if updating doesn't automatically being it in, then I suppose you need to install the 9.5 first.

brvx said:

Thought is was going to all endpoints at the beginning 8/16. So if updating doesn't automatically being it in, then I suppose you need to install the 9.5 first.

I could be wrong but given the amount of time that 9.5.0 spent in beta (June to August), I'd expect 9.5.2 to spend more than a few days in beta status.

Hi ZRL1,

Thanks for your continued postings.  I've been working on this.  I cloned my entire main computer onto a back drive, so that I'm testing near-enough live files.  The download of 9.5.0 was quick and easy.  It installed without any problems.  I had to prompt it to update to 9.5.2, but that then worked fine.  On restarting the drive, I get a message telling me that Sophos Anti-Viris isn't running, but it goes away after about a minute.  I've never had this message before when running a previous version, so I don't know why it's taking longer to open and run.

I can't really see any difference between 9.4.2 and 9.5.2, except that the wording is slightly different in the scan box.  Otherwise, I have no idea what has been improved.  I will run a full scan of my system overnight, to see if that finds anything.

It sounds as if even 9.5.2 is still a Preview (beta version), so I'll go on testing it on my spare drive.  Hopefully, it'll be made into the next official version soon.

Thanks again for your help (and that of brvx).

Hi ZRL1,

Thanks for your continued postings.  I've been working on this.  I cloned my entire main computer onto a back drive, so that I'm testing near-enough live files.  The download of 9.5.0 was quick and easy.  It installed without any problems.  I had to prompt it to update to 9.5.2, but that then worked fine.  On restarting the drive, I get a message telling me that Sophos Anti-Viris isn't running, but it goes away after about a minute.  I've never had this message before when running a previous version, so I don't know why it's taking longer to open and run.

I can't really see any difference between 9.4.2 and 9.5.2, except that the wording is slightly different in the scan box.  Otherwise, I have no idea what has been improved.  I will run a full scan of my system overnight, to see if that finds anything.

It sounds as if even 9.5.2 is still a Preview (beta version), so I'll go on testing it on my spare drive.  Hopefully, it'll be made into the next official version soon.

Thanks again for your help (and that of brvx).

I ran a scan of my test backup drive (containing 264 GB of applications/data) overnight.  As expected, it found 'No files with detections'.  It had finished by the morning, so I was unaware of any issues during running.  ('No files with detections' is the replacement wording for the old 'No threats founds'.)

Running a scan on  ~/Library/Mail  takes the same amount of time (25 seconds) on 9.5.2 as on 9.4.2.  I know this isn't exactly a scientific experiment, but the scanning time on this small file (1.5 GB) hasn't improved, or got worse.

My original question was if Sophos was going to discontinue 'Sophos Anti-Virus'.  I think that's been answered adequately, in that a new version is in the process of being released.  I am greatly relieved, as I see no benefits in the 'Sophos Home' in its current state.