What to do with a phone before selling

There comes a moment in everyone's life when they need to buy a new phone. Old someone gives to children / parents / wife, and someone sells. In this process, not only the one who buys a smartphone is at risk, as he can run into deception. The seller is also at risk, because he does not just give away his device, removing everything unnecessary from it, but gives the buyer a smartphone, which may contain personal data or something else important. To avoid this, you need to do everything right. Today I will share step-by-step instructions that will allow you to avoid unnecessary problems, do everything quickly and finally buy a new smartphone.

What to do with a phone before selling

Selling a smartphone must be correct.

How to prepare your phone for sale

First of all, you need to learn the main principle of selling a smartphone in the secondary market. There should be nothing superfluous (and personal) in it. Otherwise, you may end up with a situation like mine, when I returned the test phone and accidentally forgot to reset it. It's good that after me he came to a man whom I know well. He told me about it, we laughed and he reset everything to factory settings.

If you don't reset your smartphone before selling it, then you can not only give your photos, including very personal ones, to a potential attacker, but also share something much more significant. For example, access to accounts, bank card data and various passwords.

What to remove from your phone before selling

As I said, everything must be removed from the phone before selling. But this is too general a phrase from the memoirs of Captain Obvious. Here's what to do step by step.

Copy your saved photos

Now you can use cloud storage services for free. Typically, if you accept that the data will be slightly compressed, you get unlimited storage. For example, Google compresses photos to 16MP and videos to FullHD. Then download as much as you want. This quality is quite enough for a personal archive.

If you don’t trust the “sales cloud”, copy everything to your computer. To do this, you can use a wire, but you will need to enable USB debugging. You can also throw everything over a memory card, but sometimes it may not work.

What to do with a phone before selling

How convenient it is when everything is in the cloud.

You also need to do with the data. Applications usually store everything themselves in their clouds, and the rest of the data can also be saved on Google or Yandex, but the allocated space will be consumed, the volume of which is usually limited to 15 GB (you have to pay for more).

WhatsApp Backup

For some other messengers, this is also true, but of the main ones (Telegram and WhatsApp), it is in WhatsApp that you need to make a manual backup. In Telegram, everything is already stored in the cloud.

In order to copy all messages, go to the settings in the WhatsApp application itself and select backup. You will have to wait a bit, but there is no other way to save your correspondence.

On the new phone, you will need to perform the opposite procedure. Also go to the settings and click to select restore their archive.

Copy contacts

This is not even about backup, but just copying. I have been doing this for a long time and I highly recommend everyone to keep their phone book on Google. Believe me, no one needs it there, no need to flatter yourself. Moreover, you don't need to store contacts on a SIM card.

In order not to think at all that your contacts may be lost, you need to go to the phone menu, select the “Google” section, then “Services in your account”, then “Synchronize contacts”. Now you can select the copy option you want. If you enable one, then the contacts will be automatically downloaded from the server, if the second, then automatically saved to it, and if both, then the synchronization will be complete. This is most convenient.

What to do with a phone before selling What to do with a phone before selling

What to do with a phone before selling What to do with a phone before selling

The phone has a section with accounts. It can be found in the settings. Before the final reset, it's best to unlink all accounts one at a time. It will be safer this way. Just go into each and click “Exit” or “Unlink”.

Data encryption

Another useful step is data encryption. Even if you delete everything from your smartphone, most of it can be restored using special software.

To make this impossible, go to the settings in the “Security” section, find encryption there and enable it. This can be done in advance – it will not be superfluous.

Full phone reset

A full reset can now be performed. To do this, go to the settings, find the “System” section. In it, select “Reset” or “Reset settings”. Next, select the item where “Reset to factory settings” is written in brackets and click. It remains only a few times to agree that everything will be erased and this is irreversible.

This way you can protect as much as possible from the fact that your data falls into the wrong hands. And, of course, do not forget to remove the memory card and SIM card before selling. In general, you have to be careful with a SIM card so as not to run into trouble.

Successful sale!

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