Just upgraded to 8.0.4. The protection panels are not allowing directory backup or trash history to function on the startup drives of both my iMac and my MacBook Pro. See attached images. Have tried restart. iMac has Fusion Drive and MBP has OWC SSD.

In case you got a bad update, try reinstalling the program by running the Installer. You can download the TechTool Pro 8.0.4 installer from the Available Downloads at the bottom of the My Account page.

After reinstalling the program, launch the application, allow it to update the TechTool Protection system preferences pane, configure the prefs pane, and see if the features work. If they do not, please send a message to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. , including a link to this thread. You will receive a reply by email, and may be asked to send in some log files. Thank you.

Here is the reply from Tech Support.

"Thank you for your message. [The directory data for] Solid State Drives cannot be backed up because data on SSD’s is rewritten as soon as it is deleted through TRIM. With the update to 8.0.4 we are showing SSD’s as unavailable because recovering data from those drives wouldn’t be possible. If you encounter any further issues please let us know."

Thanks for posting the reply. Here are a few more details:

In order to write to a sector on an SSD drive, the sector must first be erased (have all zeroes written to it).

The TRIM feature of the SSD drive writes zeroes to the sectors formerly owned by a file soon after the file is deleted (to prepare the sectors in advance for the next write operation), so the Trash History data would be pointing to empty sectors (sectors containing all zeroes). It was felt that the Directory Backup feature would not be likely to make file recovery work from SSD drives, so that was disabled for those drives.

I'm a bit confused, so as of now, you're saying that because the new MacBook Pros (and I assume other models) with SSD drives will NOT allow Directory Backup and Trash History?

But TechTool 8.0.4 DOES perform SMART check on these drives, and from what I have heard, SSD's don't really need a SMART check either.

So that leaves only Volume Usage (and email alerts) for the SSD drives... is that right?

For SSD drives, the Trash History and Directory backup features have been disabled, as described above. Volume usage and email alerts are unaffected. There is a lot more to TechTool Pro than its system preferences pane.

We have already recommended that people not use disk optimizers on SSD or hybrid drives, because they would interfere with wear leveling.

You can still use the Surface Scan test on SSD and hybrid drives to check for unremapped bad blocks, and the Volume Structures test and Volume Rebuild tool (provided there is enough free, contiguous disk space for the new disk directory files to be written in a single piece each). The File Structures test is unaffected by whether a drive uses flash memory.

There is no reason why S.M.A.R.T. testing cannot be done on SSD or hybrid drives. When these drives were new, the S.M.A.R.T. tests from all vendors had to be updated to report the data correctly for them:

Can you use SMART tools with SSDs?, by Aran Pitter