How to Wipe and Clean your android device completely before selling it

If you are planning to sell or trade your mobile phone,to a friend or stranger,Simply deleting stuffs from your phone may not make it ,there are chances that your phone may leak out some of the personal information you used to store like your photographs,videos,documents or anything else,As we already know that deleted stuffs from a phone can be recovered to some extend or completely using recovery software and various apps,In order to remove a file completely it must be overwritten,so the free space left after file deletion gets occupied which makes the deleted file unrecoverable.

Let’s see in few steps about how we can format our phone completely ensuring that no clues of past files remains behind.

1. Remove Micro SD card or other extensions-Turn off SD card encryption (If on) and safely eject the memory card from your device,this will be your first step towards phone cleaning,once you have ejected your memory card you can keep it safely and plan out its use for your next mobile.
2. Encrypt all files in your phone’s internal memory-The next thing you need to perform is to encrypt all the files stored on your phone’s internal storage,(Some devices may not support this feature),the option is available under Settings > security > encryption,the encryption process will take some time and requires your device to be charged upto the optimum level.
3. Logout of all account on your phone-The next step that you need to perform is to logout of all the account and remove them from the device,In order to perform this ,Goto Settings > Accounts , open each of the account one by one and select the remove account option.
4. Factory reset the phone-The next step need to perform is to reset your mobile phone,this will remove data from your phone (Which will be still recoverable) Before performing a reset just ensure that your phone is not configured for automatic backup,to perform a reset head to Settings > Backup and reset  Factory data reset,and perform the format.
5. Copy Unnecessary files to fill up the space-As we have already described above ,the deleted files will get un recoverable,when the freed up space upon deletion gets filled up,So fill up the free space with some unnecessary files,this will overwrite the memory that was used to store the files.
6. Perform a reset again-Once you have complete all the steps listed above,perform a factory reset again and wipe up your phone completely.

You can repeat Step 5 and 6 multiple times in order to obtain better outcomes,Once you perform all the steps listed above you can ensure that the files stored previously on your phone get un-recoverable and safe.

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