How to Erase your old phone

So, I’m sure we have all been here at some point. Wanting to hand over our old phone to someone else, whether it is a family member or selling to someone via eBay or similar. The main concern with this is, How can I make sure all my data is gone before I hand it over?

On any phone, be it Android, Windows or IOS, it is always good practice to remove any accounts before attempting to reset the phone. This is particularly important on iPhones as failure to remove your iCloud account can result in your email still being linked to the device even after erasing.

For your ease we are going to just go over the method of removing accounts from these devices.

We will do this over several posts so stay tuned.

Starting with iPhones,

The two main accounts that have to be removed from an iPhone before you pass it on are your iCloud account and your iTunes account. These are listed in the Settings section of your iPhone.

If you scroll down your Settings list until you find the iCloud section, if you go into this section then scroll towards the bottom. You should see a “Remove Account” button. It may ask you for your iCloud password before you can remove it but once entered the account should be gone from the iPhone.

Once this is done you will want to do the same for your iTunes account. To do this you need to go back to the setting section and just below where you found iCloud, there should be an iTunes section. Once you have found this you should see an iTunes account name at the top of the screen. Select this account and it will pop up asking what you would like to do with it. In this instance we would like to remove it so we choose “Sign Out”.

Once this is done, your iPhone will not be logged into any accounts.

The next step is to erase the iPhone. To do this we need to go back to the Settings list.

This time we want to go into “General” and then scroll right to the bottom of that list.

At the bottom it should say “Reset” click on this and you get to a small menu.

We want to click on “Erase all content and Settings” it will then confirm this is what you would like to do, once you click “Erase” then the phone will delete all personal data.

With this, your iPhone is erased.