I am a regular Simracer. For those not in the know, we race virtual cars on virtual racetracks in games called "Simulators".
One of the activities we do is to race online in groups of 20 to 30 people and we have to share "Mods" (which can be either original trackls or cars) which the racing organizations kindly package in either EXE or RAR files to make it easier on the least proficent members to install easily in their simulator programs.
As online racers, we often get beta versions or one off versions of future releases. That means that I and another 10 to 30 people max will be the only ones downloading a given file.
I trust the provenance of these files 100%.
Yet Norton AV deems these files too "rare" and possibly danbgerous. Fine, normally files like that would be moved to a quarantine repo from which I can then retrieve them. But not with Norton. Norton will show me an alert saying that the file was deleted, it will even show me a window where I can choose what to do with the file, except that the only choice is "delete" (which it already has done) and I basically I have to start from scratch downloading this file since there is no tracve of it anywhere.
Some of these files can get as big a 2 or 3 GB so downloading them again is less than practical.
I would understand this behavior if Norton identified a known Virus or malware of sorts. But these files are deemed "unsafe" simply becauise of the small download footprint they have.
I don't mind Norton looking out for me and I don't mind having to click a few more alert windows, but instead Norton teases me with a broken "multiple choice" popup and it has already deleted the file that took me 1/2 an hour to download.
Since this only happens with about 25% of the files I usually download (as in there is no rhyme or reason since the otehr files are just as rare) my only choice is to turn off the download AV. I don't like to do that because on large files that means keeping it off for maybe up to 45 minutes or even more.
Sometimes I time it so I turn it off right before the file finished downloading. But that means I have to sit around monitoring the download so that a program that should help me stramline and make my life safer won't zap a file I need to use.
What I want is this:
1) If a file is not a known virus, simply ask me if I want to delete it or keep it and then actually give me that chice. Don't tease me.
2) In case I am responding to the prompt, place this file in quaranteene and ask me later.
3) Let me tag a download as "safe". I know that this feature is alrady implemented, but it doesn't work on a file that Norton deems unsafe and deletes, and for the files where it does work, I have never been able to tag a fole :safe" without either spend an eternity at it or get some sort of website error.
Can Norton do any of the above? Because if not then my solution will be to simply ditch it and go with an AV that has such a user friendly feature. Norton has gotten a lot better than it used to be. But still it does not give the user enough choices. It's still too paternalistic in areas where it shouldn;t be. AGain, do what you want on known virus and threaths, but not on downloads that simply have few users. It's silly.