How to Wipe an Android Device Perfectly

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Do you know the data you deleted from your smartphone is actually never deleted. Let us put it straight here — If you decide to sell your smartphone or give it to someone the first thing you do is you wipe all your personal data from smartphone by Factory Resetting the device. But a traditional factory data reset doesn’t ensure that your data is 100% gone for good. There are plenty of tools available in the market which claim that they can retrieve the deleted data from your Android Smartphone and many of those actually work.

This horrid fact must have left you pretty uncomfortable. But before we suggest you ” How to Wipe an Android device perfectly ” it’s important to understand how Android Storage works.

Most operating systems including Android comes with option to Delete files and when you hit the delete button the file is supposed to be deleted already. But this doesn’t happen, the Android actually just make the file invisible to the user and shows that the space is freed. This seems stupid but actually deleting files from the storage can take a toll on the hardware. The number of reads/writes/deletes are the reason HDDs and SDDs comes with estimated lifespan. Keeping files hidden, when deleted, and re-write older files only when newer are uploaded reduces the number of modifications and increase the lifespan of hardware. This storage handling technique also comes in handy if you delete any vital files accidentally.

Without any further a due, Let’s get started!

Encrypt your phone:

Now that you are aware of the fact that your personal data is going to stay within your storage after a factory data reset, you should at least Encrypt all your personal data so no one could take advantage of it. The encryption doesn’t make software change its ways on how it manages deleted files, but if someone retrieves your data they won’t be able to take any advantage of it.

Go to Settings >> Security >> from there scroll down and hit the “Encrypt phone” option.

Load the phone with files of less importance:

As we already explained earlier in the post, files will only be gone in actuality when they are replaced with newer files. Therefore, load your phone with files which are of very less importance to you like movies, videos, songs and photos. Upload as much of them as possible, then again perform a factory data reset. Now, even if an intruder manage to retrieve your data he will only get dummy data.

Please let us know in the comments section if you have any other tips for securing valuable data on Android phone.

Featured Image Source: Shutterstock

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I have an aptitude for writing on technology and that does not necessarily come from my Degree in Computer Sciences. I like travelling and trying new restaurants. I have a great sense of humour that makes me highly likely to be extra witty. Blogging is my hobby and I plan on taking it seriously in near future.