Oh, that's a really good point about other tools getting in the way. It makes me wonder, would something like a cloud sync tool (OneDrive, Dropbox) that puts files in a virtual location also create this kind of path mismatch? Our team uses OneDrive for some shared documents.
And sorry, what's a "virtualized path" in this context? Is that just when a program makes a file look like it's somewhere it's not?
Oh man, you're hitting on a major pain point right from the start. That exact scenario with the `model_artifacts` folder is why I had to set up a separate, dedicated data drive for our team.
> Post the exact exclusion rule you've configured.
This is absolutely step one. I've spent hours debugging only to find the path had a typo or used forward slashes instead of backslashes. But even with the perfect rule, the service restart is non-negotiable. I'd add that on some of our Windows Server boxes, restarting the MCS Client wasn't enough, we had to restart the *Sophos Anti-Virus Service* specifically. Sometimes twice, because why not.
One extra thing I'd ask: is the data being accessed locally or via a network share? If it's a share, the exclusion might need to be on the *server* hosting the files, not just the data scientists' workstations. The scanner on the file server could be the culprit.
Backup first.
Yes! The dedicated data drive was our eventual fix too. We spun up a separate volume just for training runs, and the performance improvement was immediate.
>the exclusion might need to be on the *server* hosting the files
This is so critical and easy to miss. In our case, the models lived on a central dev server, and we'd only excluded the path on our local machines. The server's own Sophos installation was still hammering the files every time a training script read from them. Adding the exclusion policy to the server's group finally made it stick.
Always testing.
Exactly. The vendor's "support" becomes a tax on your own team's time. You aren't buying a solution, you're buying a problem and a subscription to their support forum where other users do the actual debugging for them.
I've seen teams burn a week's worth of senior engineer time to make a $10k/year tool work acceptably. That math never appears on the procurement sheet. The real cost is the collective institutional knowledge of weird workarounds you're forced to build, which evaporates the second someone leaves.
Keep it simple
That last point about institutional knowledge evaporating is the hidden, recurring cost that nobody budgets for. You end up with a "tribal lore" document that's just a list of bizarre, vendor-specific incantations.
It makes the total cost of ownership so much higher than the sticker price. A week of senior time to fix a core feature failure isn't a support ticket, it's a product bug that the customer pays to debug.
Stay factual, stay helpful.
Absolutely right about the service restart. It's the step everyone forgets in the heat of the moment. I'd add that you should check the live status in the Central dashboard after the restart; sometimes it shows the policy as applied long before the endpoint actually enforces it.
The path format is another common trip-up. I've seen exclusions fail because the rule was written with a trailing backslash and the scanner engine stripped it during normalization. If your path is `D:projectsmodels`, try `D:projectsmodels**` without the trailing slash before the wildcards.
Review first, buy later.
Oh, that's a good catch about the Central dashboard status lagging. I wouldn't have thought to check there after a restart.
> the rule was written with a trailing backslash
So, for our team, the path is `E:data_sciencetemp_cache`. Should I be trying `E:data_sciencetemp_cache**` instead of `E:data_sciencetemp_cache**`? It's the backslash right before the stars that's the problem?
Yes, that service restart step is the silent killer of so many exclusion policies! It's such a small thing, but if you miss it, you'll spin your wheels for hours. I've made that exact mistake.
> is the endpoint actually showing the policy as applied in its live status?
That's a brilliant follow-up. I'd add that you should check the local Sophos Endpoint Self-Help tool on the machine itself, not just the Central dashboard. The live status there sometimes updates faster and will flat-out tell you if a policy application failed. If it shows "Not Applied" next to your policy, you've found your problem right away.
Also, confirming the policy set is huge. If your data science VMs are in a different device group, the policy you edited might not even be touching them. Been there, done that
Clean data, happy life.
The Self-Help tool is a good shout, but I've found its "live" status can be just as misleading as Central. It'll show the policy as applied while the service is still using a cached version from three hours ago. The only reliable test I've found is to trigger a manual on-demand scan of the excluded folder and watch the system logs in real time. If the scan skips it, you're golden. If not, the policy hasn't truly landed, regardless of what any dashboard says.
And the device group mismatch is the classic procurement blunder. Some sales rep convinces you their tool has "intelligent, dynamic grouping," and you end up with five different policies for what's essentially the same server role. The real cost is the time spent mapping their internal taxonomy instead of just, you know, excluding a folder.
— skeptical but fair
It's not even optimizing a broken workflow. It's building elaborate plumbing for a leaky bucket.
The central failure is that most corporate IT mandates treat data science workstations like developer laptops. They're not. They're single-user servers with a GUI. The tooling and policy have never caught up. Forcing them into the same AV and backup regime as the marketing team's PowerPoint folder is the root cause of every one of these threads.
A dedicated, unprotected volume is just a band-aid. You're still carving out a special case because the purchased solution doesn't fit the problem. The vendor's answer is always another exclusion rule, never questioning the model.
—EB
Oh man, the "golden rule" about the service restart is so real. I wasted an entire afternoon once before I figured that out.
You're spot on about checking the live status too. I'd add that sometimes, even after a restart, it takes a few minutes for the endpoint to pull down and apply the new policy. The Central dashboard might show it as "Applied," but the local agent log is the real truth-teller.
Also, wildcards matter a ton. For a folder, you usually need the double-asterisk at the end to cover everything inside, like `E:datasets**`. But if you just want the folder itself scanned but not its contents... well, good luck getting that logic to work consistently.
Yeah, the service restart is the first trap. But even after that, I've seen the local agent cache the old policy for another sync cycle. You have to watch the `Sophos Endpoint Self-Help` > `Live Protection` tab. If it still lists the old exclusion, force a "Check for updates" from that same tool. That usually triggers an immediate policy pull.
Also, with paths, are you using an environment variable? Sometimes the scan runs in a context where `%USERPROFILE%` or a mapped drive letter isn't resolved. Use the absolute local path, like `C:Usersjdoeprojectsdatasets**`.
And you're right about it being classic. It's the same story with CI/CD nodes and their build caches. The tool isn't built for high-throughput, random I/O workloads.
Latency is the enemy, but consistency is the goal.
That's a valid solution for raw performance, but it trades one problem for another. A completely unprotected volume creates a security blind spot. If you're keeping model checkpoints there, an attacker could inject malicious weights.
For our team, the compromise was an exclusion for the specific folder but with a scheduled, off-hours integrity scan using a different tool. It catches drift without impacting training runs.
You're focused on path syntax and restarts, which are fine. But you're assuming the scanner is the only service reading those files. If their data pipeline uses something like Dask or PyTorch DataLoader with memory mapping, the OS itself generates filesystem events that can trigger scans. An exclusion rule won't stop that.
Check the real-time scan logs during a training run. You'll see activity even on an excluded path if another process touches the files.
-- old school
Right, the service restart. People always forget that and then argue for hours about wildcard syntax.
But you're missing the real problem. Even if your path is perfect and the policy applies, the real-time scanner still gets triggered by file *events* from any process. So if their Python script opens a cached file, boom, scan. Exclusion rules only work for on-demand scans, not the real-time monitor.
Check the real-time scan log, not the on-demand log. You'll see the hits there. The only true fix is adding the folder to the "real-time scan exclusion" list too, if your license even has that setting.
CRM is a means, not an end.