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There’s a previous post from 5 months ago on this topic. 

I just recently bought Webroot for our small company, and I’m in the process of rolling it out to my Mac users, I have run into the same issue with Dropbox and the initial scan that the previous post talks about.

We have nearly 900 GB in our Dropbox! I tried signing out of Dropbox on my Macbook that I use for testing, to see if the initial Webroot scan would thus quickly skip or ignore files that aren’t stored locally. But the scan just attempts to open a Dropbox file (online only), and it waits several seconds to see if it will download before moving on. 

From the previous post, I was hoping that enough time has gone by that an update to Webroot for Mac might have resolved this. It doesn’t appear so.

Hello @clayg 

 

Let me ping @ChadL  and also you can contact Webroot Support as they would know more until Chad replies.

 

Webroot Support:

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Call 1-866-612-4227  during the week Mon - Fri 7 AM to 5:30 PM (MDT)

Note: When submitting a Support Ticket, Please wait for a response from Support. Putting in another Support Ticket on this problem before Support responses will put your first Support Ticket at the end of the queue.

 

Thanks,

Thanks, I reached out to support yesterday but their suggestion didn’t help. I tried “signing out of Dropbox” on my Mac, which would stop any file syncing from the cloud, but the initial scan still attempts to scan all of the Dropbox files. It waits several seconds on each file before giving up to move on to the next file, so it appears to be even slower than if I let it download each file from Dropbox to scan! (Support response below):

Hello,

In mac environments hosted drives can be seen as local, this activity also occurs when time machines are connected during the initial scan. After the initial scan through, you can disable Scan archived files to avoid this activity from continuing to occur. Also initial scans in a Mac environment do typically take longer, these scans take up to 24 hours, especially if there is a time machine in place. One thing you could do during this process, to reduce the initial scan time, is disabling Dropbox or any timemachine back ups then re-enabling once the agent has completed this scan. This activity is typically expected in mac environments, but would not be expected to occur in Windows environments.

Regards,
Webroot Business Support

As of 16th June, the support response was - 

“Our team our aiming to fix this in a future update but I have no ETA for this.

Our only advice is to turn off the "File On Demand" feature for dropbox or uninstall Webroot in the meantime.”

I’ve had Webroot uninstalled for several months now.

Good news. I signed back into my Dropbox on my Mac, and it prompted me to let it do a change in how Dropbox stores files so that it would utilize Apple’s updated File Provider API.

Link to article here.

After letting that process complete, I started the initial scan again and it completed in 22 minutes and it ignored my Dropbox files! Yay!

 

 

Awesome to hear and thanks for the info! 😎

Thanks, I reached out to support yesterday but their suggestion didn’t help. I tried “signing out of Dropbox” on my Mac, which would stop any file syncing from the cloud, but the initial scan still attempts to scan all of the Dropbox files. It waits several seconds on each file before giving up to move on to the next file, so it appears to be even slower than if I let it download each file from Dropbox to scan! (Support response below):

Hello,

In mac environments hosted drives can be seen as local, this activity also occurs when time machines are connected during the initial scan. After the initial scan through, you can disable Scan archived files to avoid this activity from continuing to occur. Also initial scans in a Mac environment do typically take longer, these scans take up to 24 hours, especially if there is a time machine in place. One thing you could do during this process, to reduce the initial scan time, is disabling Dropbox or any timemachine back ups then re-enabling once the agent has completed this scan. This activity is typically expected in mac environments, but would not be expected to occur in Windows environments.

Regards,
Webroot Business Support

Wow, I wonder how long an initial scan would take on my Mac with Time Machine? My Time machine dates back to March 2019, over 1 TB of back up.

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