Newbie here, just installed Avast Home and let it do a full scan. I cannot see how to exclude an entire external drive, in my case its the Rebit automatic backup USB drive. I want to exclude it because it is an exact clone of my C: drive (that’s the point of Rebit) so scanning it is redundant and takes alot of time.
I can exclude individual files, but I can’t see how to exclude an entire drive letter. Thank you.
Shoot, this might be hard to explain, because I’m at work and I have a professional edition (different than the home version that you’re using), but can you not just do a “selection scan” and only scan the drives that you want, instead of doing a “local disks” scan?
I can’t remember if you can do a “Folder Selection” scan on the home version, but I don’t see why not.
You can use folder selection, but I don’t believe that this information is retained for the next scan.
So you have the Program Settings, Exclusions, Add and enter the drive letter:* (e.g. h:* the * wildcard excludes all sub-folders and files) and that will exclude it from all on-demand scans including the ashQuick.exe scan but not the resident scan. Like all things in life that comes with the usual warning you would be possibly be leaving a hole in your security, but so long as you don’t exclude it in the standard shield the risk would be limited but still there non the less.
Unfortunately the Rebit external backup drive is not listed as a drive letter in Explorer, its just listed as Rebit with the frog icon. And in the Avast Exclusions dialog box, there’s no Check Box next to it, to select it. Seems to be a dead end.
Hmm… sorry, I don’t really know how else to help you without having the Rebit drive myself.
It seems like it’s doing a software RAID mirror, if the drive doesn’t have it’s own drive letter. So theoretically Avast should be scanning 1 drive “logically”, not one after another.
I guess I just don’t understand what the software is doing.
How do you see the folders/files in the rebit back-up drive in windows explorer ?
Surely they must be referenced in some way or how could you check the contents.
I too have no idea of how the software performs this as windows would normally recognise and usb storage device when connected and allocate it a letter ???
When avast is scanning data the standard shield or on-demand scanner would report what it is scanning, what is being shown when the files on the rebit drive are being scanned ?
You could put say a copy of the eicar test file (http://www.eicar.com/anti_virus_test_file.htm) on the rebit drive (how you might go about that is something I can’t help with) you would need to pause the standard shield whilst you do that or avast would alert.
Now run an on-demand scan and avast should alert on the eicar.com file on the rebit drive and the path and file name would be displayed in the alert, this may give a clue as to how you might exclude that drive from that information.
Other than that I’m out of ideas.