Kaspersky Offline Updates with Server Mirror [How to]

It is a well known fact that Kaspersky has always been one of the best, if not the best antivirus software. However, one of the gripes that I have against Kaspersky is the first update normally takes a very long time to complete. That is because Kaspersky don’t use a web installer that downloads only the latest files, nor regularly push out an updated installer that contains the latest virus definitions. Their geo-located servers can definitely help to speed up the transfer for users at some parts of the world but unfortunately not for users located in Malaysia.

In our latest test with Kaspersky 2015 products, the first update downloaded a total of 48.97MB and the detailed update report shows an average of 37.25KBps download speed that’s taken 24 minutes to complete. If you need to install Kaspersky on a few computers, a lot of Internet bandwidth and time will be wasted on the first update. A solution to this problem is to create a local update mirror by downloading the virus definition database and storing it in a shared folder. Then, configure Kaspersky to use the shared folder as the update source. The painfully long update process will complete in just a minute or less.

Here are the steps to create a Kaspersky update server mirror that will also work for Kaspersky Anti-Virus, Internet Security and Total Security 2015.

1. Download Kaspersky Update Utility 2.0. Click on the Files button and select the version depending on your operating system. For Windows, it would be the one with .zip extension (the .gz is for Linux and FreeBSD). Extract the ZIP file.

2. Download the configuration files containing the modified locale.ini, updater.ini and updater.xml, and extract to the Kaspersky Update Utility 2.0 folder replacing the original files.

3. Run UpdateUtility-Gui.exe from the folder where you’ve extracted the Kaspersky Update Utility 2.0 and you should see Kaspersky Internet Security 15.0.[1.415, 2.361] on the list. If you don’t see it, that means step 2 is done incorrectly and you did not replace the original configuration files with the modified ones. Do note that the Kaspersky Anti-Virus and Total Security 2015 can also use the Internet Security 15.0 database.

4. Click the Start button and go do something else because the Kaspersky Update Utility 2.0 will take quite a while to finish downloading the complete virus definition and program update database. By default, the database will be stored in the current folder and that can be changed in the Settings area.

5. After finished downloading the Kaspersky database, the only thing left to do now is to configure Kaspersky to check and use the database that you’ve downloaded using the update utility. Go to Settings > Additional > Update > Select update source and click the Add button. Select the “Updates” folder that is found inside the Kaspersky Update Utility folder and click OK.

6. Now you should be seeing two update sources which are the Kaspersky Lab update servers and the path that you’ve chosen. It is important that the chosen path is located on top while the Kaspersky Lab update servers are at the bottom so that the Kaspersky software will check for updates from the local source first, while the second on the list will act as a backup if the first source fails. Right click on Kaspersky Lab update servers and select “Down”.

7. Now whenever you click on the Run update button in Kaspersky, it will check for updates from the local source. You should notice that the average download speed is way higher and the total duration takes less than a minute to complete.

Important Note: Unless you’ve scheduled the Kaspersky Update Utility to automatically download updates so that the local virus definition database is always kept up-to-date, you should reconfigure the update source to use the official Kaspersky Lab update servers. Otherwise Kaspersky would constantly check on the outdated source and thinks that it is up to date.

If you need to create a mirror for older Kaspersky products such as 2014, 2013 or even 2012, you can do so by clicking the Applications button and selecting the versions from the Home products group.