I always assumed that any files, folders or partitions I add to "Items to Exclude from Scans" were excluded solely from Manual, Idle or Scheduled Scans -- whether Quick of Full. I.e, I thought that RealTime protection was still monitoring for any malicious or suspicious activity in these excluded areas, and also that I could still do an on-demand context-menu scan of an an excluded item. But today when I right-clicked on a 100gb folder in Windows 7 and selected Scan Now, I got an almost-instant "No Threats Found." I.e., no scanning actually took place (scanned items=0).
What I'd like is the following for, let's say, "Excluded" Folder E:
-- DON'T scan E during a Full System Scan or a Quick Scan, whether run as idle, on-demand, or scheduled.
-- DO scan items as they are written to, or accessed on E. I.e, provide Real Time protection.
--Allow me to do a context-menu scan of E or any of its subfolders or files on-demand.
How, if possible, can I accomplish this (without going through add/remove/re-add processes with exclusions)? The folders I'm excluding contain primarily media files (maybe 90% of files, and almost 100% of used space).
Thanks.
Hi,
Did your scan result showed count in trusted files or skipped files?
You wrote:
“-- DON’T scan E during a Full System Scan or a Quick Scan, whether run as idle, on-demand, or scheduled.
– DO scan items as they are written to, or accessed on E. I.e, provide Real Time protection.
–Allow me to do a context-menu scan of E or any of its subfolders or files on-demand.
”
I was wondering how you meant to scan a folder or file using context menu scan, which is a type of Quick scan, specifically targeting destination.
Adding a file or folder to ignore or exclusion list would prevent it from being analysed during all scans(thats what it is meant to be done).
May be during read or write access, it would be monitored, but when thats done the results may be suppressed.
Hello Ardmore,
Nikhil_CV is correct. When you exclude an item from Scans, it is excluded from all scheduled and manual scans. This includes the context menu scan option. There is no option to select which types of scans can be excluded.
The results you noticed, a No Threats Found notification with 0 items scanned is the expected behavior when the file is marked as excluded from scans.
As long as the item is NOT included in Real Time exclusions, it will be protected when accessed or written to.
Hope that helps.
So the good news is that for items I don't want routinely included in "tasks" I *am* still getting the realtime protection, but the bad (or more like "inconvenient") news is that I won't be able to scan any of those items ad hoc when I want to without temporarily removing them from exclusions. It would be nice to have an option added to allow ad-hoc checks on excluded items, but it's not as if I need to do it very often.
Anyway, thanks and I'll leave this as unanswered a bit longer just in case anyone else has some additional comments or "tricks" that simplify things a bit.
Hello Ardmore
You can put your desired option into the new product suggestions in this area of the Forum. Thanks.
http://community.norton.com/t5/Product-Suggestions/bd-p/Suggestions
Good idea, floplot. Done.
Hello Ardmore
Thank you for coming back and giving us an update and marking your thread as solved.