Vanishing Hard Disk Space?

Is your free disk space gradually vanishing after installing Symantec Endpoint Protection (SEP)?

If you have noticed this, check out the following locations on your hard drive

on Windows Vista:
[installed drive]:\ProgramData\Symantec\Definitions\VirusDefs  

or on older Microsoft OS versions such as Windows XP Windows 2000:
[installed drive]:\Program Files\Common Files\Symantec Shared\VirusDefs

If it looks like this:

you may need to update your Symantec Endpoint Protection installation to Maintenance Release 2 (MR2).

I came across this problem while rolling out Symantec Endpoint Protection 11.0 on a portion of our network. Oddly enough the client PC’s SEP installation (after updating to the latest virus definitions) had taken upto 2~3 GB of hard disk space! Something was wrong or at least I thought so. After a quick check with SpaceMonger my suspicions were justified. It showed the culprit being the virus definitions folder, which contained hundreds of tmp*.tmp folders taking up more than a GB of disk space!

A quick look in the Symantec knowledge base told me that this was a common problem and that Symatec Endpoint Protection had just released its MR2 which has fixed this and many other issues according to the release notes.

You can check your installed version by clicking on “About” in the “Help and Support” icon on the SEP client interface. If the version number is lower than 11.0.2000.1567 you don’t have SEP MR2 so you’ll need to upgrade.

Upgrading is pretty straight forward. There is even an easy to follow step-by-step migration guide available. So start you upgrade now.

However, upgrading will not get rid of all the tmp*.tmp folders that already exist, you’ll need to delete them on your own.