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How to temporarily disable auto-update?


Go to solution Solved by Marcos,

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Posted

Hi,

I need a way to disable automatic download of updates for ESET Cyber Security Pro (Mac).

First of all, I know it's not secure, it's not recommended, it's mommy knows best, it's whatever-the-million-of-other-reasons-you-can-name. But I have one that counters all of them.

In the place I live it currently, in Germany, internet providers are often of not the best quality. Outages are not uncommon, and usually I have 1-3 outages per month that last more than 1 hour and 1 every 1-2 months that last more than a day. I still have to to my job, though. So I'm using mobile internet as a fallback measure. Mobile internet in Germany is pricy as fhell, money they charge for extra packages are just insane. And each time there's an outage, I have to use a limited, metered connection. Which means each and every single byte of transferred data = money. If I run out of my monthly traffic limit before the next billing date, I'll have to put up 10€ for every 2Gb of traffic, just to keep doing my job.

And automatic updates - is something that eats away bite by bite off that precious traffic pie.

So it boils down to something really simple: why do I need an antivirus, if I don't have the internet? Or if I don't have a job because of that antivirus, who ate all the traffic I needed to do my job? I surely can live without an antivirus update for a day or two, don't you agree?

I have disabled all automatic updates and downloads in my system except one: ESET. It's OK to notify me about a new update. But it's NOT OK to download things without my permission.

Hence my question: how do I disable automatic downloading of updates by ESET Cyber Security Pro (Mac)?

  • Administrators
Posted

Currently it's not possible to disable product updates, however, we haven't released any so far either as far as I remember.

Posted
3 hours ago, Marcos said:

Currently it's not possible to disable product updates, however, we haven't released any so far either as far as I remember.

Just this morning it was trying to download a ~130mb update. Just as I was trying to have a daily over Zoom using a 3G metered already-laggy connection 😕 Which has prompted me to write this post. Sure, you can delay it. For a while. But it will be repeating again and again and again and again... Not the best UX decision, tbh...

  • Administrators
Posted

So you are talking about module updates and not about product updates?

Posted

I'm talking about everything that downloads anything at all. A user should be able to prevent any automatic download. No download should ever happen without user's explicit approval, be it ask-me-every-time or remember-my-answer-for-a-day-week-month-year-forever, or a setting checkbox, or a dropdown.

People are so used to live in the world of unlimited internet that they often forget that even in 1st world countries, like Germany, a fast unlimited internet connection can easily be an unaffordable luxury.

Posted
18 hours ago, Marcos said:

You can temporarily disable updates in Scheduler

Great! That's exactly what is needed. Thank you!

Though I have to say that this is quite... surprising UX decision. :) For a User, at least.

I do understand why it was done this way, though. Most probably, because a UX engineer was too busy (or not existing at all), and PM told the dev team "just do it somehow, anything will do". For a developer mindset this is a pretty obvious place for a recurrent/scheduled tasks. Still, Principle of Least Surprise applies to the Users too. And least surprising place for the User, when he is looking for an update-related settings, is the "Update" section of the preferences.

@Marcos, I don't know if are able to transmit user feedback to the PM/POs, but if you do, I think there will be other users out there who would appreciate seeing at least a comment on the "Update" settings pane, that they can change the update frequency or disable it completely on the "Schedule" pane.

Thank you again for the help! I hope this topic will help someone else, too. :)

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