Is it safe to unplug external drive when CIS doing background scan of drive?

[Guest]

[scanreg]

I backup stuff to an external drive

When that drive is connected, CIS does a background scan of the whole drive and bogs down the machine to the point of becoming useless

I'd like to do a quick backup of the files but then just disconnect the external drive even if CIS is doing a background scan of that drive

Is it okay to disconnect the external drive in the middle of a scan, or might the disconnect during a scan mess up some files?

Thanks

[Ronny]

As long as it's just 'reading' it won't harm. When a process is 'writing' or having something to 'write' in the cache for that disk that's where trouble starts.

If you are sure your drive is 'clean' you could use the following, don't start any applications, disable your network, switch AV to disabled and run the backup.
Disconnect the drive once done, switch AV back on, re-connect the network and start doing your day to day things.

[ddavis84]

A way to keep CIS from scanning that drive:

When the drive is hooked up go to Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management. Once you are inside Computer Management on the menu tree on the left hand side under Storage is Disk Management click that.

Now you will see all the storage devices that are installed on your PC (internal and external) as shown in my screen shot below if you have named the drive you use to back up your files you can assign it a lower drive letter and then in CIS you can set it up as an exclusion in the AV tab (see screen shot #2) from then on when you plug that drive in it will set to the letter you have chosen for it and CIS will ignore it as far as scanning goes.


Note: Only do this if you are 100% sure that the files on that drive are clean, and all future files are clean as well.

[scanreg]

very interesting, thanks very much

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