Are you plan to sell your old phone or laptop to buy a brand new phone with the latest features? Possibly, the next thing you will do is delete all photos, videos, files, messages, and data from your phone. Some people may perform a factory reset to clean up the phone. But, remember, the new user can still access almost all your information from a used phone using recovery software. So how to securely delete all information from your phone in such a way that the new user cannot retrieve it from your phone. Here are the tips to do it.
Android operating system (OS) rules the smartphone world as 87% of smartphones used Android as OS. Before deleting the data from your Android phone, first back up the data that you actually need.
Backup Phone/Tablet
You can back up your files using Settings>Accounts and backup>Backup and restore>Back up data. You can backup content, setting, and data from your phone to your Google or Samsung account. You can restore the backed-up data to your new phone. But you can’t restore the backup from a higher Android version phone to a lower Android version phone. To back up your data using Google account, turn on Back up my data, then select an account to backup files. Then click the Google Account, in Backup, turn on Back up to Google drive. You can see the active backups like App data, call history, contacts, device settings, SMS text messages. In accounts and backup, there is a Smart Switch option in the Samsung phone. You can transfer images, contacts, and messages from your old phone to a new phone through USB cable or can wirelessly. But you need to download the Samsung Smart Switch app to your phone.
Backup Laptop
In Windows, you can back up your computer in several ways. Go to Control Panel>System and security>Backup and restore. If you never backed up before, select Setup backup and follow the steps in the wizard to complete the backup. You can also create a system image, the system image contains all the information on your pc at that particular time. You can access Create a system image from the left pane of the Backup and restore the window.
Factory Reset your Phone
Remove the SIM card(s) and memory card from your device. You can manually log out from your Google account using Setting>User accounts, select your account and tap Remove. Delete history and saved passwords from your browser. Open the Settings then System>Advanced>Reset. If you don’t see Advanced, tap Reset options then tap Erase all data (factory reset) then Reset the phone. If asks unlocking, enter your PIN, pattern, or password to unlock. To erase all data from the internal storage tap Erase Everything. After the erase operation tap to restart.
Upload junk data
You can add a layer of security to your files after deleting the files, photos, and videos from your phone. Before the factory reset your phone, delete all photos, videos and all other files from your phone, then copy-paste some useless videos to your phone or record some blank videos or photos using your phone camera and try to fill it with your internal storage. So if an unknown user tries to recover your data will get only those useless or blank files. As the old files are replaced with the new one, it is very difficult to recover old files without corruption.
Delete Your Phone from Sign-in device
In your Google account, go to security, under Your devices, you can see the devices that currently signed in to your account. Click Manage devices, to delete the device that you want, select the device setting and click sign out.
