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Processes exclusions

The Processes exclusions feature enables you to exclude application processes from Real-time file system protection. To improve backup speed, process integrity and service availability, some techniques that are known to conflict with file-level malware protection are used during backup. The only effective way to avoid both situations is to deactivate Anti-Malware software. By excluding specific process (for example those of the backup solution) all file operations attributed to such excluded process are ignored and considered safe, thus minimizing interference with the backup process. We recommend that you use caution when creating exclusions – a backup tool that has been excluded can access infected files without triggering an alert which is why extended permissions are only allowed in the real-time protection module.


note

Not to be confused with Excluded file extensions, HIPS exclusions, Detection exclusions or Performance exclusions.

Processes exclusions help minimize the risk of potential conflicts and improve the performance of excluded applications, which in turn has a positive effect on the overall performance and stability of the operating system. The exclusion of a process / application is an exclusion of its executable file (.exe).

You can add executable files into the list of excluded processes in Advanced setup > Protections > Real-time file system protection > Real-time file system protection > Processes exclusions.

This feature was designed to exclude backup tools. Excluding the backup tool's process from scanning not only ensures system stability, but it also does not affect backup performance as the backup is not slowed down while it is running.


example

Click Edit to open the Processes exclusions management window, where you can add exclusions and browse for executable file (for example Backup-tool.exe), which will be excluded from scanning.
As soon as the .exe file is added to the exclusions, activity of this process is not monitored by ESET Safe Server and no scanning is run on any file operations performed by this process.


important

If you do not use browse function when selecting process executable, you need to manually type a full path to the executable. Otherwise, the exclusion will not work correctly and HIPS may report errors.

You can also Edit existing processes or Delete them from exclusions.


note

Web access protection does not take into account this exclusion, so if you exclude the executable file of your web browser, downloaded files are still scanned. This way an infiltration can still be detected. This scenario is an example only, and we do not recommend that you create exclusions for web browsers.