Thanks for the info. But I already understood that the user cab specifty normal folders/directories for ransomware protection. The Time Machine volume, however, isn't just a regular directory/folder like my Documents folder or my Home folder. It's a mountable/unmountable volume, containing a data folder with sparsebundles inside, etc. Bitdefender, for example, makes a big deal about how its ransomware module protects not only certain standard folders by default, or other folders that the user can specify, but also the Time Machine volume. I'm wondering if Avast can do the same thing.