Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
I thought that I had my phone factory reset process down to an art, thanks to the frequency with which I reset and send back review devices. But recently I had to reset an older device — and just before I was about to start the process, I decided to go back and check if it had missed anything important. That’s when I realized it had a few things I actually hadn’t backed up.
After all, the data on a temporary or secondary device is generally less important than the data on one that you used as a daily driver. In my case, I was also selling the device, so I didn’t have the option to simply leave it as-is in case I needed to recover something later.
The incident prompted me to take a closer look at my process and adjust it accordingly. So when it comes to factory resetting your old phones, what are the steps you should take to make sure that you don’t lose data?
Are there any steps you've forgotten before factory resetting a phone in the past? 24 votes Checking that all my media was backed up. 17 % Moving my authenticator apps. 25 % Unlinking my banking app. 17 % Removing my Google Account. 13 % Exporting data from my local-only apps. 4 % I've forgotten a few of these before. 17 % I never forget to do any of these. 8 %
1. Recovering photos and videos
Megan Ellis / Android Authority
Keeping backups of your photos and videos is easier than ever, thanks to services like Google Photos. However, if you don’t upload your pictures at their original quality, or you have folders that aren’t saved to cloud services, it’s worth taking a look to see if there’s anything important that you want to save.
In my case, I realized that the old device hadn’t actually been set up to sync with Google Photos. Some of the pictures were generic landscape images that I wouldn’t have missed, but there were also some pretty adorable photos of my cat. In this case, I was glad that I went back to double-check what was there.
Cloud services make these backups easy, but it's good to make sure you haven't missed any important folders.
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