There are many times when people factory reset their android smartphone. Mostly they do it when their memory gets full, the performance of the device becomes slow due to a lot of applications, there is some malware related issue with the phone, or when people are selling it or giving it away to someone.
The process of factory reset is designed to be such that whenever user does a reset, every data and setting gets deleted from one’s phone, which takes the phone back to the same condition in which it was when it came out of the factory, thus giving existence to the term ‘factory’ reset.
How to Do a Factory Reset?
To do a reset, all one needs to do is go to their Android smartphone’s Settings section. From there, go to the System settings, where you will find the Advanced option. In the section, the is an option called reset, which you need to choose so as to do a factory reset. Remember, always back up your important data such as contacts, music and other things you find important before doing a factory reset.
Is Data Recoverable After a Factory Reset?
Yes, it must be known that Android data is recoverable even after one does a reset. This is a very important thing, because it might be of help to the people who lost something important, and it might be harmful for those who did a factory reset to protect their data.
There are various tools and softwares that are available with which you can extract your mobile phone’s deleted data. All one needs to do is look for them on the internet, download them and use them for extracting deleted data from a mobile phone. It is a very simple process indeed.
Now the question is, can we still protect our data? The answer to that is also yes. You can still protect your data.
Let us look as to how that can be done-
Built-in Encryption of Android Devices-
Before Android released their operating system Marshmallow 6.0, the Android phones did not come with default encryption. One needed to put it up before doing a factory reset so that their recovered data cannot be directly.
But since the Marshmallow 6.0 update, the phone comes with encryption that has been already enabled, meaning that even if you recover your phone’s data, you would not be able to access directly without going through the encryption.
Cloud Backup-
Cloud backup is another thing you need to look at. Most phones these days sync some important data on Google Drive from where you can recover it on a new device or even your older one even after a factory reset just by accessing your Google account.
However, there’s no guarantee that cloud backups such as Google Drive is completely safe. In fact, it’s the exact opposite of safe. There have been many cases of cloud storages of people being hacked and their data being stolen, so always remember to keep only unimportant data on your Google cloud storage.