Avast snapshots directory in EFI System Partition

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

Customer PC, Windows 10 with Avast IS 11.2, unable to install latest W10 anniversary update (1607)

  • error “couldn’t update system reserved partition”

Turns out his 100MB EFI System Partition (ESP) only had 13MB available, not enough for an update (15MB?). I looked inside the partition and found that there was a 35MB “snapshots” directory created in May 2016 - after some research it appears that this directory and files are created by Avast, as part of its sandbox virtualization feature. I could not find any reference about this in my searches here or in google, but I did the following and hope that it will prevent Avast from taking up any of the scarce space in the ESP again:

  • in Avast Sandbox settings, changed Sandbox Storage setting from “same drive as modified file” to “[u]C:[/u]” - hoping it will henceforth only create snapshots on C:
  • deleted existing snapshots directory from ESP

Curious if anyone else has come across this?

cheers,
pbig

2

Update to the latest version (12.3.2280): https://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=189836.0

3

Also teach the customer to keep things (especially security related) up-to-date.

4

Thanks for the replies guys, I do understand about keeping software up to date.

Are you saying that the observed behaviour does not occur in the latest version?

5

Yes, NG has been replaced by CyberCapture.

6

Excellent, thanks!

7

You’re welcome.

8

And on a note, 100Mb is not really enough for Windows 10 if also applications are installed on that drive/partition.