Is Avast turning on the archive bit?

[Condoman]

Up until today I had been running 23.2 free. Now updated to 23.3 free.

First, I suspect Avast but cannot be sure yet. Avast runs weekly before I get to look at my desktop Wednesday morning. I am on: WIN_10 Version 2009 (OS Build 19045.2728). It completes normally with no errors indicated.

What has happened however it has turned on the archive bit for 24,787 files (I think). I have been monitoring the bit on 1 file and this morning it went from off to on. I have not accessed this file in years.

I have my own backup script that will backup any file that has the bit on and then turn the bit off. The result is a backup of normal daily access to various files for 6 days and then this huge backup on the 7th day.

Next week I will turn off Avast for the scheduled run to see the test file archive status.

Any other thoughts about this would be helpful. Thanks.

[igor]

Can you try running Process Monitor to see who's making those changes?
I suggest to set up a filter, e.g. "Path is (or begin with) ***"

[Condoman]

Will do. I'll report back next week.

[Condoman]

Well its been a month and this has been my journey.

Turning off the shields did nothing. As typical Wednesday morning my backup program picked up thousands of files with the archive bit turned on

Next I tried to use Process Monitor and left it running overnight (with a filter). That resulted PM using all available memory (32M) and crashing. A full reboot got things back in order. Experimented with saving PM to a file and that worked for PM but I decided to remove Avast first.

Along the way I modified a program that runs each morning and I use it to detect backup files greater than 20G. At least I am watching for the issue where I was not in the past.

I have now had 2 weeks where the problem has been fixed. Of course I am running Windows Defender instead of Avast.

Later this week I will install the latest Avast Free and see if the issue moves from Wednesday to another day.