I'm a new Bitdefender user - bought and installed Bitdefender Total Security yesterday. Since moving to Windows in 2002 I have always used 3rd party antivirus and firewalls, but assorted free ones up to now. Installed Bitdefender yesterday evening, ran the Quick San, which was clean, then started working through the documentation and options. I perhaps foolishly started a System Scan wile still reading the docs and checking and changing settings. The scan took 18 hours, mostly because of the two USB HDDs connected to the laptop, both with about 3TB of data on them. I am ... upset by what Bitdefender did during the scan. I knew my machine was 'clean' for my definition of clean. I did know that in the current working data folders and their backups of all my emails, received and sent since 2002 by my old and new email programs, their were emails containing viruses - but they are perfectly safe there and are part of my full email history I wish to keep. I also know I have some programs that many AV products detect as malware even though they are perfectly legitimate tools for one's own use on one's own system, like some of the Nirsoft applications to e.g. show, sort and allow the export of the passwords stored in my Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome installs.
What I expected from use of a number of other AV products was for Bitdefender to flag what it thought was malware and allow me the option of what to do with each item, like delete, disinfect, quarantine or ignore - and I really hoped fr a 'create exception' option. I could then see exactly what kinds of things Bitdefender does and doesn't detect, and make appropriate configuration changes such as defining particular folders to be scan exceptions. What I GOT was 123 'unresolved items' - i.e. it asked me what to do, as I wanted and expected though sadly no 'create exception' action - and 120 'RESOLVED; items where Bitdefender had disinfected or (mostly) deleted things WITHOUT ASKING - a few utility programs and a whole stack of emails, mostly in multiple copies between the old and enw email program eamil stores plus manual copies of thsoe folders as back ups. It's a massacre. And especially for my old email program, having emails externally rewritten or deleted will mean that all the groups will be corrupted and likely even group recovery will fail. And it did not find a single thing that actually was unknown to me and did deserve to be deleted, disinfected and quarantined.
I can fix it all. I can re-download the removed apps and recreate the way I had them installed. And for the emails, while the manually copied data folder backups are trashed too, the Acronis True Image backups are not so I can restore them. But I am NOT happy.
I do not like, welcome or expect programs that think they know best and act ignorantly, with unwarranted assumptions and without asking. There should be an option in Bitdefender to have it NOT take automatic action on things it finds, but just report and ask for user input as to what to do. Is there such an option? I couldn't find it going through every settings option I could find.
If there is no such option, I will be really regretting having paid for Bitdefender Total Security. If this was a free AV I'd shrug, uninstall and move on, but having paid for a year's license, this is upsetting. I understand that for many completely non-techie users who never even open a settings panel, a default setting to automatically 'fix' things the way the program thinks is likely to be best is appropriate, but it should jut be a SETTING that can be changed to give the user who wants it full control over the actions the program takes.
