How to make sure your data is really deleted before selling your Android phone

Could you think a “Factory Reset” will erase and remove everything on your android device? If you think like that you’d wrong.

Lot of tools and software available in our market for the data recovery after a complete factory reset.That's because when you delete something, the file itself isn't actually overwritten — the system just throws away all the info on the file, essentially tossing it in with whatever free space you have. Recoverable data can be a huge privacy problem while you are planning to sell your android phone.

Below are the few ways to ensure your data is really erased forever.

Encrypt your phone

Encrypting your Android device is the best way to prevent its data from being recovered. By encrypting your phone or device, you are actually scrambling all the data and locking with a password. Once encrypted, the data can't be decrypted without entering a passcode.

Most devices running Android 6.0 Marshmallow are required by Google to have mandatory encryption for maximum security. If your device is running Android 5.0 Lollipop or lower you can turn on encryption by (Settings > Security > Encrypt phone). Setting location may be vary on different devices.

Essentially, by doing this, you'll be erasing scrambled data which is virtually unrecoverable.

Overwrite it with throwaway data

So now that you've scrambled your information, factory reset it and erased everything, how about we go significantly further and ensure the new destroyed encrypted data is much more reproduced and worthless by overwriting with new junk data.

Then set up your android device again, but this time don’t sign into any Google accounts or anything. After finishing your device setup you can start recording a video for as long as you can, at the highest resolution. Repeat this process up to fill up all space.

Then do another factory reset.