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Bangalore — Want to sell your old smartphone? There are many such popular websites that buy your old mobiles online and you do not even need to step out of your home. But the question arises – is selling your old phone or laptop safe?

The answer to this question entirely depends on you. If you are wise enough to wipe all the data from your old phone, sell it to a trusted vendor, and make the transaction through a secured channel, selling an old mobile is safe.

With advancing technology the generation of smartphones keeps evolving swiftly. After a while, either your phone becomes inefficient to run the latest features or you feel left out from following the current fashion and trends. If you too feel the same and plan to switch to a newer generation or model and want to make some money by selling your old phone, you can always sell it online with a trusted website.

These websites buy your old smartphone and repurpose it in different ways like – reselling it to new users at a commissioned price, disassembling it in pieces to supply the parts to smartphone makers or repair markets, refurbishing, or recycling it. In all these methods you get rid of your old phone for a good chunk of money and your phone is repurposed productively rather than ending up in a heap of e-waste garbage.

Before selling your old mobile online or in an offline marketplace, you need to be sure about its safety. To ensure the safe disposal of your old gadget you can follow some simple steps. Usually, these steps are classified into three broad topics – backing up your important data, contacts and documents on the memory, signing out of the mail, social media, and WhatsApp accounts, and formatting it permanently so it cannot be accessed again.

In this article, we have covered some simple steps that you should follow before selling your old mobile.

If you’re looking to sell your Android phone online but are unsure about backup, signout, or formatting it, you can go through this guide to make this process seamless for you:

Step 1: Backup Your Important Data

Backup your contacts:You can backup all your contacts to a Google account so that you can retrieve these in your new phone by simply signing in with the same account. To back up the contacts, you need to open the “Settings” menu on your Android phone, then tap on Google and head over to ‘Google Contacts Sync’ and then tap on sync contacts or automatically backup and sync device contacts. You can also do it manually by visiting contacts.google.com.

Back up your data and settings:Most people do not know they can back up the phone settings, documents, web browser bookmarks, and other app data like saved games on your Google account and import the same setting into your new phone. The process is very simple – head over to the ‘Settings’ menu, then to ‘Accounts’ (tap Google), select the Google account to which you want to back up the settings and then check the things you want to sync. You can even backup tiny settings like Wifi passwords, head over to Settings > Backup and reset > Device backup and check Back up to Google Drive.

Backup your photos and videos:To backup your photos, videos, documents, and other files lying in your phone storage, you can either transfer these to physical storage like a laptop, hard disk, another phone or to cloud storage so you can retrieve all these images, wallpapers or videos in your new phone.

To transfer your images and videos to a laptop or HDD is fairly easy – connect your phone and laptop with the help of a USB data cable. When you connect both devices, a notification will appear in your notification bar that says “Charging this device via USB,” now you tap on it and select ‘File Transfer’ under Use USB For menu. Now you can access your phone’s data on the laptop by browsing ‘My Computer’ and can copy or move it to the laptop’s drive or an external HDD. This way you create a physical backup of your audios, videos, and image on another device to access these later on. You can also transfer this data with the help of an SD card.

If you are not having any other physical device where you can copy this data, you can create its backup on a cloud storage platform. All you need to do is create an account on cloud storage and login to the same in your Android phone in the cloud’s app and then choose what you want to back up. Some of the popular cloud storage services and apps are Amazon Drive, Autosync, Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive.

Step 2: Signing out from the accounts

Though you are gonna format all the data and reset your phone to factory options, it is advised to log out of the social media and Google accounts. Factory data reset can uninstall the apps and delete the app data, still, some preinstalled apps may remain logged in. To add an extra layer of protection it is strongly recommended to log out from all the apps manually.

Logging out of WhatsApp:First backup all your chat history and media by tapping on the Settings > Chats > Chat Backup > Backup To Google Drive. Then open your Android device Settings, head over to Apps, scroll down the list to select WhatsApp, then select ‘Storage’ under Usage and then tap on Clear Data. When you tap on OK to confirm, you automatically logged out from WhatsApp, you can open the app to confirm and reassure.

Logging out of Gmail and Social Media Accounts:Logging out of Facebook, Instagram and other social media apps is pretty simple. In most of the apps, the “Logout” option is buttoned at the bottom-most of the settings menu. You can log out from the app by confirming the ‘OK’ button. To reassure you have safely signed out of all the social media and cloud accounts, open your Android device’s settings, scroll down to ‘Accounts’, and then you will see a list of cloud accounts, Gmail/Google accounts, and all the social media accounts on your phone. You can log out of these by tapping on ‘Remove Account.’

Removing your SIM Card and MicroSD Card:You certainly do not want to sell your SIM card with your old phone, so removing your SIM card from the device might be a usual thing to do. But, most people forget to remove microSD cards when they sell or dispose of their old phones. You might have already formatted that SD card, but these tiny memory cards are highly vulnerable and the data on these cards can easily be recovered to its original state even after formatting the card multiple times. That’s why you should never sell a microSD card with your old device.

Step 3: Perform a factory reset

Formatting your phone thoroughly or factory reset it is considered to be the most important step before selling an old phone. By doing so you delete all the data from apps to settings, images, songs, videos, passwords, contact to almost everything by returning the phone to its initial state when you first bought it, that’s why this process is termed as ‘factory’ reset or ‘hard’ reset.

It is almost impossible to regain the data after a hard reset, but as you have always heard ‘it is better to prepare and prevent than repair and repent you need to encrypt your data before formatting it.

When you encrypt your phone you essentially build a password-protected firewall ahead of your phone data. In the worst case, if your data is somehow recovered (technically it is in a million chances), it cannot be accessed without the encryption key, which means your crucial information is always safe if you undergo this simple step.

Once you have encrypted your phone, you can now format it. Open your Android device’s settings, go to Reset > Factory data reset > Erase All Data, enter your lock screen password and then delete all. Now, your phone is thoroughly formatted and you can sell it safely without worrying about your data privacy.

In the above section, we have discussed some technical details and things that you should do with your phone before selling it. There are many usual yet crucial things you need to check to ensure a safe transaction between you and the buyer of the phone to avoid any possibility of duping.

Press Release Distributed by The Express Wire

To view the original version on The Express Wire visit Things to do before selling your old mobile

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