Excessive vbt files in /Library/iAntivirus/temp

[excn]

I got a warning today that I had run out of enough diskspace for my backups. Checking, I was down to 400MB, which is probably not enough for caching these days.

I started moving files to my external disks but the space kept being consumed.

I finally tracked the culprit: iAntivirus had 7.5GB (!) of vbt files in its temp directory.

Even in today's large drives (and yes, my little 80GB Macbook drive should be upgraded), this is a HUGE take of resources.

I went ahead and deleted them, since they were temp. But what's preventing iavd from taking out its garbage?

[AChen]

Hi Excn,

iAntiVirus should clean this folder on startup. Have you restarted iAV in a long time before this happened?

[excn]

Actually I had. If the Mac OS locked up, would that have prevented the cleanup? But the files were fairly old. I have to restart a few times a week for a variety of reasons, but I also have a fair amount of rude system shutdowns.

I've not seen new files since deleting those 7.5GB, so maybe this is a reasonable explanation?

--
excn
"is this going to be on the exam?"

[AChen]

It's a pass :D

[iway007]

My 200 GB drive never had more than a few percent free space, no matter how much I moved off to USB/firewire drives. Finally someone directed me to the WhatSize utility, which found the problem ... 70,000 files, 133 GB of ".vbt" files in /Library/iAntiVirus/temp. I am so glad to have identified the issue, and gotten a healthy amount of free disk space back! Have no idea why the files have not been routinely deleted, as this discussion suggests should be happening. Perhaps it was derailed in a Mac OSX upgrade or something.