I’m using Free Avast Antivirus 18.3.2333 . I have an portable application which is marked as false positive. Every time I plugin my USB, or create/download the portable app, Avast puts the software in quarantaine. Now I’m pretty sure the portable software is not malware. But I can’t send it to avast to scan the app, because it’s about 200MB big.
Next I tried to put it in the ignore list. But as far as I can see, I only can select an app, including the folder where it is installed. So now, when I copy the portable app to another folder, it’s deleted again… Is there a workaround so Avast just ignores the app based on the filename, and not the complete path and filename?
AFAIK there’s no way with AVAST to add a particular file/folder as a universal exclusion. You can add it (Copy as path) in a particular location, for instance: C:\Users\User Name\Documents\Portable Apps\Program Name and that works.
But if, indeed as Bart Huybrechts describes, you copy it, perhaps for backup purposes, to another location maybe onto another HDD or external storage AVAST may well take it upon itself to quarantine the file/folder. You can tell it to restore from the virus chest but it will put it back there when it finds it again.
I’ve had this happen many times with some Linux based tools I use occasionally for things like specialist image or font format conversions. The only way I have found to deal with this is add each instance’s location as an exclusion, backup to the same locations each time and hope AVAST does not intervene whilst copying.
The problem is that with external storage, like a flash drive not permanently attached, the drive letter may have changed from when you’d added it as an exclusion. For this reason over the years you can end up with multiple exclusions paths for exactly the same file on E:, F:, G:, H:, X:, :Y etc.
With a portable app, which Bart Huybrechts no doubt wants to copy to a flash drive (that’s rather the point of it), apparently having to restore the ‘suspect’ file and add/save a new exclusion path each time this happens can get more than a bit annoying.
Obviously the first thing to do his case is to establish that the portable app mentioned is safe and then, hopefully, one of the helpful AVAST experts will actually answer his question.
