Quarantined or not?

[LQGuy 0]

Hello,

 

I'm trying out ESET Cyber Security Pro for Mac on my iMac.  The scan ran for days and found 39 items, including 9 trojans and about 18 variants of java.  For the trojans, I had the system delete them.  All files found during this scan are still in the Quarantine folder found when I click on "Tools>Quarantine".  That was yesterday.

 

For the heck of it, I started a new scan yesterday, immediately after I stopped the above because it was running for 4 days.  The second scan is still running.  In this second scan, ESET is finding the exact same trojans and other variants.  Why is that?  I thought they were quarantined.  

 

Related, how do I know if I'm deleting or quarantining a truly problematic file?  Or if ESET falsely identified something that my system needs to operate?  

 

In responding, please keep in mind that I'm brand new to all of this.  The more simplistic (but clear) the response, the better.

 

Thanks very much!!

 

Chris 

[planet 232]

Hi Chris, do you have any external drives attached to your iMac, including a Time Machine drive?

[LQGuy 0]

Yes....I use an external drive to manage my Time Machine backups.

[planet 232]

In that case, it is recommended to exclude your Time Machine backups from scanning which you can follow the steps outline here: hxxp://support.eset.com/kb3263/?locale=en_US
 
I have quoted an older post from another topic below with a link to explain Time Machine & ESET (or any other antivirus software):

Please stop the scan and create an exclusion for your Time Machine as ESET does not need to scan your Time Machine device, following the instructions here: hxxp://support.eset.com/kb3263/?locale=en_US
 
If you like, you can then start another scan in-depth which should be much faster as it should avoid your Time Machine device.
 
Hopefully Cyber Security (and Pro) will automatically exclude Time Machine devices by default in future releases. I went into detail in an older topic about Time Machine and ESET which you can view here: https://forum.eset.com/topic/4060-still-scanning-after-24-hours

In summary, Time Machine is a pretty complex system and scanners aren't able to recognise that. Thankfully most other security vendors have now excluded Time Machine backups by default, hopefully ESET will do the same or provide a simple option in the Preferences to automatically set exclusions.