Privacy matters and you might have some serious confidential documents stored on your android device that you won’t like to be shared with a stranger who might be purchasing your phone. Its better to take measures before you sell your phone to any dealer or individual. All your documents, phones, videos can be leaked and shared without your consent. Many antivirus solutions for android devices provide complete erase solution, you can find one or we have some useful points that will help you in completely wiping and cleaning your android device before passing it into the market space.
We will be listing manual ways to wipe and clean your android device properly before you sell it but you can even use some trash or junk files cleaning applications that will make your process a lot easier and faster and even you can use the android device manager that can remotely erase everything on your phone, in case you just forgot to wipe it personally.
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Properly Erasing your Android Device before Selling It
So just have a look at the points listed below that will help you in properly eradicating every single piece of evidence that was ever stored on your device.
- Log Out & Remove all Accounts – first primary step would be to log out of all the accounts you have ever signed in your device. You can perform this step by going to Settings > Accounts and removing all the accounts one by one, so that no leak could be left to exploit.
- Removing Micro SD Card – this is the second step you need to attempt, simply turn off the encryption (if you have enabled on your card) and then remove it from your device. Now you can keep it safe as it could be used in other device or could be used to make complete transfer of contents to computer.
- Encrypting Internal Files – before we actually reset the phone, lets make sure to encrypt all the internal files, all phone’s might not have this feature but latest ones will surely be accompanied with this one, you can do this by navigating to Settings > Security > Encryption.
- Factory Resetting the Phone – the major step, is to reset your phone to erase all the contents and even reset the device to factory settings. You can do this in Settings > Backup & Reset > Factory Data Reset. It not ends just over here next 2 steps are more crucial.
- Copy Dummy Files – after your phone has been reset, its time to make some dummy file transfers, just copy some random bunch of files to your internal phone memory, with this step we will make sure that if someone tries to recover erased files, these dummy files will popup, as you will be covering the hard drive with new files, so it has to overwrite older recoverable data.
- Factory Data Reset Again – another crucial step, after you have copied dummy files, just attempt the Factory Data Reset once again, so that new dummy files are erased and only those files could be recovered and all your previous data is wiped completely.
So guys these 6 steps would be your key to complete wipe and clean setup in android in case of selling it in public. Make sure you attempt all these steps as privacy really matters. In case you have some really nice applications or tips that could be added to this post, do share your remarks below.
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