Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac Home Edition

[AMC3]

I installed Sophos MacHomeAV on our 3 laptops last night and proceeded to have it do its initial scan on all three. The scan took a number of hours on 2 of the laptops and finished. However, after 12 straight hours of scanning, Sophos says it still has 6,507,554 files to scan on my MacBook Pro. It is actively scanning, but at an very slow pace. Also, how is it possible to be scanning 6.5 Million files when Disk Utility says my laptop has only 676,493 files?  Note that the pref setting in Sophos for scanning inside archives and compressed files is OFF.  All three laptops are running OS 10.6.8. What's going on???  Any suggestions?  

[mattie]

Hi, I don't know if this will help you, but...

I downloaded and installed Sophos antivirus free for the mac, and it ran really slow, taking a minute at least to scan each file.

I tried a few things to try and speed it up, such as unchecking the scan archives option, but nothing seemed to work. In the end I uninstalled it using the supplied uninstaller and began looking for another AV solution.

I couldn't find anything to my liking so decided to reinstall sophos and just leave it running a scan, even if it took from today (Friday) to Monday to complete. I reinstalled the software and reran the scan, hey presto the scan is running really fast and should be complete in an hour, total time 2 hours.

Not sure what the issue was, but worth a try to see if helps speed up your scan too.

[Roiphe]

Mine hasn't even started scanning. After two hours, it is still calculating. I wonder if this has happened to anybody else.

Five minutes later: I quit Sophos, restarted the scan and now it is scanning very fast. Go figure.

[AMC3 · Accepted solution]

I had the same experience... at first. Then, I figured out what was happening. After looking more carefully at what was being scanned, I found that Sophos was setup to "Scan Local Drives". That meant it was scanning not only my MacBook Pro hard drive, but was also scanning my two 500 GB backup "clone" hard drives AND my 500GB Time Machine hard drive that were attached to my laptop.  The combination of all those drives amounted to some 6-7 Million files and the never ending scan process. 

Once I reconfigured Sophos to only scan my laptop hard drive, the scan took quite awhile but was easily completed overnight (5-8 hours?) and showed a number of files to be scanned that related to the amount of files on my laptop hard drive. 

[Roiphe]

Thanks. That makes perfect sense.

[mattie]

After three false starts, its frozen my macbook pro with 234,000 odd files left to scan Will be removing sophos from my mac and installing kaspersky

[Agile]

Just a reminder that if "frozen" means the count doesn't change, but everything else works fine, it is likely scanning inside some sort of an archive.  When scanning the enclosed files is complete, the number will continue to increase.

[trinidad]

To the OP. Do you have Bootcamp installed by any chance? If so make sure you create a scan excluding Bootcamp. It will resolve your problem.

Best regards,

[RxDdude]

Hi, Forum - Having the same problem while running Sophos v7.10.3C on OS X Lion v10.7.3. - IMHO, Sophos' default scan entitled Scan Local Drives is not a good idea. I wish Sophos would place this scan at the bottom of the list. I recommend setting up scans with the Custom too, to scan the built-in hard drive only, and to scan any other, virtual drives that Mac OS X might produce, make a custom scan for each. In the I-button for each, click and click the exclude tab, then, click the ' + ' button and browse to the Time Machine. Click the 'Open' button at lwer right corner of the list of files, and Time Machine will now appear "Volumes/Time Machine" in the Excludes window. Click Done, and that window will close. This will make the Sophos Scanner to skip over the Time Machine. Why, oh, why, OS X has the button to excludethe drive from scanning labeled 'Open' is above my pay grade.

You can repeat this procedure to find and add an externel hard drive, a partition, or a folder, to the Excludes list. 

   Good luck.