Erase all the data permanently before selling your Android phone

With the intensification of cyber-crimes, people are becoming more conscious about their mobile’s personal data in order to keep security risks away. So if you are planning to sell your Android phone or thinking about to handover it to someone else, do not forget to ensure that all your data is completely deleted before it’s too late and follow the simple instructions below:

Erasing data from micro SD card:

• In order to delete all the data from your microSD card, go to ‘Settings’.
  
• under the category of ‘Device’, tap on ‘Storage’.
  
• At the bottom, you will find an ‘Erase SD card’ option, tap this and your device will give you a warning, continue it and it’s done.
  

Apparently, all your data is now removed from your microSD card but here is the bad news, even after following the above steps, your data can be recovered by using special softwares without any difficulty.

In order to erase your micro SD card permanently, all you have to do is to fill the space of your memory card with some junk data, and then erase it and you need to repeat the process for two to three times, and here you go. Now your personal data is erased from the SD card for the lifetime.

Erasing data from Phone:

To delete everything on your phone, go to ‘Settings’ and then ‘Backup & reset’ then scroll down, here you will find the option of ‘Factory data reset’.

Following the above steps you may delete your data from the phone but one can also restore this data, so in order to nullify this risk, you need to perform the following steps before doing ‘Factory data reset’.

1. Go to ‘Settings’ > ‘Security’ > ‘Encrypt phone’
   
2. This could take an hour or more, so you need to charge your phone more than 80% battery in order to encrypt your phone.

Once this is done, your personal data cannot be recovered from your phone and you can safely handover it to anyone without any issue.

You may not find the ‘Encrypt phone’ setting on a low range mobile phone devices or the older versions of Android. In this case, you can download some well-known apps that claim to remove all the data securely. Such apps are available free of cost on the play store but don’t forget to download a well-known and well trusted names like ‘Avast’.