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.