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Learn more about Quarantine
Applicable for: Windows
Quarantine is a safe place in your Norton product for storing potentially harmful files, completely isolating them from the rest of your operating system. Files in Quarantine cannot be accessed or run by any outside processes, software applications, or viruses.
Files are moved to Quarantine in the following ways:
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If you run a Norton scan, it detects a suspicious file.
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If Auto-Protect detects a suspicious file.
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You manually add a file to Quarantine.
Set storage space for Quarantine
You can allocate dedicated storage space for Quarantine. By default, Quarantine is allocated a maximum space of 5120 MB. When the Quarantine storage reaches the threshold limit, new quarantined items get deleted automatically. You can also choose to set no limit for Quarantine storage space.
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Open your Norton device security product.
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On the left pane, click Security.
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In the Security dashboard, click Quarantine.
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In the Quarantine window, click the Settings tab.
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Under Set storage space for Quarantine, enter the storage limit value.
If you do not want to specify any limit, type 0.
If you feel a particular file is unsafe, you can manually add it to Quarantine and submit it to Norton for analysis.
Manually add an item to Quarantine
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Open your Norton device security product.
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On the left pane, click Security.
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In the Security dashboard, click Quarantine.
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In the Quarantine window, click Add/Add file.
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Navigate and select the file you want to quarantine and click OK.
If you quarantine a file that is associated with any running processes, the processes get terminated. So, close all open files and running processes before adding a file to quarantine.
You cannot add a Windows application file to Quarantine.
Submit an item for Norton's evaluation
You can contribute to the effectiveness of your Norton product by submitting files that you think is a security risk. Norton Security Response analyzes the file and adds it to future protection definitions if it is a risk.
We recommend sending the following file types:
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Potential malware: Norton has not identified files as malware, but you believe may be malicious. These are also known as false negatives (suspicious files not detected by Norton).
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False positive: Norton has identified files as malware, but you believe may be clean. These are also known as false positives (incorrectly detected by Norton).
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Open your Norton device security product.
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On the left pane, click Security.
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In the Security dashboard, click Quarantine.
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In the Quarantine window, click Add/Add file.
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Navigate and select the file you want to submit for analysis.
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Click
next to the item you added and select Send for analysis.
Delete files from Quarantine
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Open your Norton device security product.
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On the left pane, click Security.
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In the Security dashboard, click Quarantine.
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In the Quarantine window, click the delete icon next to the item you want to delete.
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In the confirmation window, click Yes.
Last modified: 04/24/2025
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