Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac Home Edition

[supotuco]

On my iMac after I upgraded to version 8.x I have been unable to complete a scan.  I have around 4.3 million items.  What happens is the scan quits in the middle of a scan.

[Agile]

What happens if you do the scan with your external drives unplugged?

[supotuco]

The scan still does not complete.

Edit:

I have also tried creating custom scans for each drive and the only ones that finish are for the small ones.  It always quits before finishing the larger drives.

[Agile]

Does the log file indicate any specific error associated with the failure?

[supotuco]

No, this is a copy of the bottom part of one of the local logs

Scan name: "Macintosh HD"
Scan items:
Path: / enabled: yes
Configuration:
Scan inside archives and compressed files: Yes
Automatically clean up threats: No
Action on infected files: Report only
Live Protection enabled: Yes

Immediate scan started at 2012-08-01 09:57:26 -0500

It does not say completed or failed or anything else.

[ceasley]

For what it's worth, I'm having the same problem.  I just downloaded Sophos 8.0.6 this week when I upgraded to Mt Lion.  I can scan individual folders, but it cannot complete a complete disk scan.  I have over 6 million files and it scans for a few hours and then just quits with no message or notification.  

[Agile]

---

ceasley wrote:

For what it's worth, I'm having the same problem.  I just downloaded Sophos 8.0.6 this week when I upgraded to Mt Lion.  I can scan individual folders, but it cannot complete a complete disk scan.  I have over 6 million files and it scans for a few hours and then just quits with no message or notification.  

---

Try a custom scan that scans the entire internal drive... does that work?

[ceasley]

I tried to do a custom scan of just my Machintosh HD.  It seemed to be working fine, but ended up quiting before it finished and it still says "this scan has never been completed".  I do think it stops scanning when the computer sleeps, but in this case I continued to work on the computer so it would not sleep.  It was running in the background, but just now when I checked on it again, the program had quit again without finishing.  I'm very discouraged about this.  With the last virus protection program that I owned I had it set up to scan the whole drive every night in the middle of the night.  It worked every time and it didn't matter that the computer was sleeping.

[Agile]

---

ceasley wrote:

I tried to do a custom scan of just my Machintosh HD.  It seemed to be working fine, but ended up quiting before it finished and it still says "this scan has never been completed".  I do think it stops scanning when the computer sleeps, but in this case I continued to work on the computer so it would not sleep.  It was running in the background, but just now when I checked on it again, the program had quit again without finishing.  I'm very discouraged about this.  With the last virus protection program that I owned I had it set up to scan the whole drive every night in the middle of the night.  It worked every time and it didn't matter that the computer was sleeping.

---

You should be able to do that with this one too.  Something is causing a failure -- this is non-standard behaviour.  Would you be able to create custom scans for different segments of your computer to isolate where the failure is occuring? I'm guessing it's likely a large archive file somewhere, but nothing beats a real-world test.

[maser]

We have this problem with the Enterprise version as well.   My guess is that when Sophos actually releases a new definitions update (which I believe is every 4 hours?) then the engine update makes the scan stop.

I worked around this to do a full scan of my computer (which took 9 hours, btw) by changing the Auto-Update preference setting from every 1 hour to every 1 day.

Then I toggled it back to 1 hour after the full scan was done.

YMMV...