Anti-virus Software

The LiveVault Online Backup and Recovery Service has been tested with many of the most popular anti-virus software products, and LiveVault Online Backup and Recovery Service is known to run successfully with these products on a computer.

Remote virus scanning

It is strongly recommended that you do not run a remote virus scan of a LiveVault Online Backup and Recovery Service Agent computer (that is, do not run a virus scan of machine A using a share from machine B).

In a remote virus scanning scenario, the files on the Agent are opened by the “system” process which modifies a file's attributes. When LiveVault Online Backup and Recovery Service recognizes that the file attributes are changed, it would determine that the file was changed and back up the file changes. This would result in unnecessarily high backup activity which will negatively impact your computer operations.

LiveVault Online Backup and Recovery Service is not able to filter the "system" process to avoid this problem.

However, when the antivirus process runs locally on the Agent, LiveVault Online Backup and Recovery Service is able to identify the specific antivirus process (referred to as a suspect process) and filter its changes so LiveVault Online Backup and Recovery Service does not unnecessarily back up the files.

General configuration steps

You need to do some additional configuration steps to successfully run LiveVault Online Backup and Recovery Service and anti-virus software on your computer.

In general, for any anti-virus software product, you need to:

• Exclude the following LiveVault Online Backup and Recovery Service directories from the virus scanning; otherwise, the computer could hang:

  • Journal files (default is \LiveVault\Journals\)

  • Database files directories, both protected and unprotected (default is \LiveVault\Databases\ containing both subfolders \Protected and \Unprotected)

• Exclude the anti-virus temporary files/directories from backup.

Application-specific configuration

Some anti-virus software products require additional configuration.

If you are running one of the anti-virus software products listed below, see the related help topic for details about running both applications on the same computer. These are the products that we have tested with LiveVault Online Backup and Recovery Service .

• Dr. Solomon's Anti-Virus (Network Associates)

• ePolicy Orchestrator (McAfee/Network Associates)

• F-Secure Anti-Virus (F-Secure Corporation)

• InoculateIT and eTrust Antivirus (Computer Associates)

• NetShield (McAfee/Network Associates)

• Norton AntiVirus and Symantec AntiVirus (Symantec)

• Norton AntiVirus for Microsoft Exchange and Symantec AntiVirus/Filtering for Microsoft Exchange 2000 (Symantec)

• Praetor for Microsoft Exchange (Computer Mail Services, Inc.)

• Sophos Anti-Virus (Sophos)

• Trend Micro ServerProtect (Trend Micro)

• Trend Micro Virus Control System (Trend Micro)

If you are using an anti-virus software product that is not included in this table, we recommend that you contact Customer Service for assistance.

Related Information

Excluding Files from Backup
Automatic and Recommended Backup Exclusions