Creating exceptions / rules for online backup programme.

[REDACTED]

The desktop client for a backup provider i use called Backblaze is with very high CPU usage; around 60% of a 2.7ghz i7.

I contacted Backblaze's support and they informed me that Avast anti virus and OSX's built in firewall (which i have enabled) are making the backup very CPU intensive.

They said i should set exceptions for their processes in Avast anti virus and OSX's built in firewall

- a) dose this sound correct ?

- b) Am i weakening my security by doing this ?


Im running OSX 10.10.5

[ondrej.kolacek]

Hello,
higher CPU usage of other applications caused by Avast is certainly possible in theory but in practice scanning stuff makes certain operations slower, which typically leads to lower CPU usage of applications. I would suggest for you to temporarily turn off web shield and/or file shield and try to find out if the CPU usage is impacted by these. If yes, please post which one of these two shields had an impact and then we can fiddle around with exceptions.
Kind regards,
Ondrej Kolacek

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Ive been doing some further testing with this and Avast seem to also be blocking / making dropbox syncing extremely slow. Dropbox synced c. 100 files in 24 hours, once i uninstalled avast as a test it synced almost 1000 files in 30 mins.

Is there a way to add an exception for dropbox ?

[ondrej.kolacek]

Hello,

we have found out a while ago that when Dropbox does a sync on APFS, instead of reading information about files from directory it opens all the files it enumerates, which forces our fileshield to scan some of them. This slows down the sync a lot, however your sync time is quite extreme. The problem has been reported this problem to Dropbox developers, but it seems we may have to work around it. Please how large is your share? Could you check via mount command what is the filesystem your dropbox directory is on?

To work around it temporarily, you can exclude dropbox directory from file shield via Avast GUI -> Preferences->Shields->FileShield Settings, Excluded paths section.

Kind regards,
Ondrej Kolacek