When I first started scanning my hard drive the scan would take a respectable amount of time, >1hr usually. Now, despite my Hard drive being slightly more full, scans take less than 5 minutes to complete. This seems a little fast to have scanned 40Gb. When watching it go it leaps through thousands of files at a time. Scanning my portable hard drive still takes a long time, and seems to scan every file.
I have Norton set to default preferences, including scanning compressed files.
When I first started scanning my hard drive the scan would take a respectable amount of time, >1hr usually. Now, despite my Hard drive being slightly more full, scans take less than 5 minutes to complete. This seems a little fast to have scanned 40Gb. When watching it go it leaps through thousands of files at a time. Scanning my portable hard drive still takes a long time, and seems to scan every file.
I have Norton set to default preferences, including scanning compressed files.
I tried it and it's the same, when I chose the portable hard drive it took about an hr and a half to scan 130Gb, when I scanned my main hard drive it took 3 minutes to scan 45Gb. It says there are no viruses, but how can I be sure it's actually scanning the files, not just skipping 99% of them?
I realise there isn't that much of a worry about mac viruses, but there are some out there, and I don't want them.
Tried it too. Does exactly the same. If it’s on my main hard drive it does it in seconds, if it’s on my portable hard drve it goes through all the files and does it slowly.
Then I would try it uninstall and after that reinstall it again. Between the two use the RemoveSymantecMacFiles utility, what you can download from here:
I would rather hope that Norton could confirm this is not normal behaviour first, before I resort to uninstalling things etc. So far, i’ve had nothing to say it shouldn’t be doing this anyway.
There's an option in norton not to scan every files every time when they are not modyfied, but then it should do the with your other drive too.... And if you have the system in that drive (the 45GB large), then it MUST scan more files, because on system partitions files are chenging all the time (temp files, program files, OS files,... etc.).
I think this is not the normal way it should work...
I don't usually read about our scans taking too little time! What is probably happening is that we've already scanned your drive before, so we are just scanning newly added files...all of this is stored in the Quickscan file..
We don't use FSEvent to watch for filesystem changes. I believe you can only get notifiction of a particular folder whose files change, not the file themselves. So we'd have to scan entire folder if a single files changes. Also, the kernel will drop fsevents from the buffer if things get too busy. Not ideal for a security product! :)
So we have our own kernel extension that watches for file system events and notifies features like Auto Protect.
What is probably happening is that we've already scanned your drive before, so we are just scanning newly added files...all of this is stored in the Quickscan file..