Norton for Mac

[artwrites]

I have an external drive, which has 540.56 GB used, and 459.3 GB available.  It's been scanned by Norton Antivirus for 3 days straight now, and it currently says:

"Scanning HD...

7677905 of 759272"

Or, in other words, it's scanned over 10 times the amount that I have.

Any idea what's going on here or how to stop it?

Thanks very much.

[karigane Spam Squasher · Accepted solution]

If it is a Time Machine volume, what you're experiencing is confusing but "normal." The backups use hard links for the files, so each backup's files are counted separately, even if the file is identical across all the backups on the volume. Symantec suggests you don't scan TM volumes to avoid this issue.

[artwrites]

Thank you very much.  That provides a sound explanation to a pretty confusing situation.