Quarantine or Delete?

[Kalmah]

Why quarantine something when you can delete it? Are their certain situations when it's better to do one over the other?

What if a system file is infected? If you delete it you may have problems, if you quarantine it... well you still need to be able to use that file right?.....

I don't have any particular problems, just asking for future reference.

 

[JBT]

Not sure either. I perfer the shoot to kill method of deleting virus on the spot my self. I'd rather have one system file get wrecked than multiple...

 

[pcnerd37]

I dont have a clue either. I just delete to be on the safe side, because you never know how tricky viruses can be and if they can get past quarantine. I figure if i screw something up by deleting it, i reformat often anyway, so it doesnt make any difference to me.

 

[gsellis]

You would quaratine something in the hope that if it is essential, it could be disinfected at a later date. So the default is quarantine. The AV scanner does not know what is actually important. It might be a .doc file and your only copy. To quarantine, disinfect, and return or to quarantine, no action and wait for a disinfection method.

 

[Medea]

Once in a while, an AV/anti-spyware picks up something that's not malware. For instance, my prior AV kept picking up Magic Jelly Bean KeyFinder as malware.

So, sometimes it can be safer to quarantine instead of deleting on the fly. You can then look at the quarantine list and, if there's nothing legit there, click Delete.

 

[theslickvik]

Thats why most programs backup before deleting