So you are buying a new Android phone. Great. Congratulations. But what do you do with the old one now? Sell it, perhaps. Or give it to a family member or friend. Either way, you’ll need to make sure that no personal data makes the transition. You will need to wipe the phone and wipe it clean. The last thing you want is for your aunt to come across selfies that aren’t appropriate for your job and secret email or text message exchanges.
But before we start erasing the phone, we need to do something else – make a backup. Then I’ll show you two ways to wipe your phone – the easy way and the safe way.
Back to Hell
You don’t want to lose your important contacts and SMS messages when you switch to a new phone. The best thing you can do is go to Setting > Reset backup and make sure Back up my data checked.
You can also back up apps so they don’t need to be downloaded again on your new phone. You can do this even if you are not rooted with Helium.
You should also back up your SMS and contacts using an app like SMS Backup+ or get everything you can with SyncDroid and send the data to Dropbox or your email.
Backup SD card and personal data
If you don’t use an automatic backup solution for camera upload like Dropbox or Google+, you should.
However, there are other ways to back up photos and other media that you have stored on your Android phone’s SD card or internal storage.
Just connect your phone to your PC/Mac and copy all the folders that store photos, music and movies from your camera (these will be folders like DCIM, Music, etc.).
The easy way: Wipe the SD card and reset the phone
Every Android phone has a built-in reset feature. It may not be in the same place for every phone but you’ll find it in Setting.
What this does is it completely wipes your device. You will be signed out of all accounts, and all your apps and personal data will be deleted. The internal memory will be erased.
But the problem is it doesn’t work all the time. Yes, the data will be deleted and it will not be possible for a normal person to recover it. But in the hands of a computer enthusiast, armed with some freely available recovery software, he/she can recover data like SMS and photos. Researchers at Avast found that more recovery is possible.
But of course, that won’t be for everyone. If you are concerned about not disclosing your data to anyone under any circumstances, move on to the next section. Or continue reading.
If your phone has an SD card, go to Setting -> Warehouse -> Remove the SD card and then press Format SD card.
Now, to really wipe the entire phone, go to Setting -> Reset backup and below Personal data you will see an option named Factory data reset.
Read the next screen and then tap Reset phone.
The phone will now reboot and the erase and reset process will begin. In a few minutes, you should see the Android setup screen. That means you’re done.
The safe way: There is no turning back
We have told you over and over that the best way to protect data is to encrypt it. I also showed you how to encrypt your entire Android storage and why you might want to do it.
Today we are going to do the same thing for a slightly different reason. When you encrypt your phone, you add an extra layer of security to all your files. Without the key, no one can get this data.
Even if the person tries to factory reset your phone. This means that doing a factory reset after fully encrypting your phone will result in a much lower chance of someone being able to recover your data. Yes, it will take time (about an hour to encrypt the whole phone) but the extra security is well worth it.
Go Setting -> Protect -> phone encryption. You will get a screen explaining what you are about to do. Knock on phone encryption to start the process.
Once that’s done, move on to the step above and follow the device wipe procedure.
For the uber paranoid: If you’re still unsure about this, reboot your phone and upload some fake data. Again, encrypt the phone and erase it. You can even do this multiple times. The chance for someone to dig deeper and find your original data is almost nil.
What do you do with your old phone?
Do you just sell your old phone? Will it make a difference when you buy your next flagship? Or do you just give it to someone? Or re-purpose it maybe? Share with us in the comments below.
Categories: How to
Source: thpttranhungdao.edu.vn/en/
