Android - What's the most complete way to erase all the data from my phone so it cannot be recovered?
Keeping the microSD is probably the main thing, so since that's the plan already it's just the phone to go.
I couldn't swear to this, but I used it when selling my g1: uninstall everything - except astro file browser or similar Use astro to wipe out any app related folders remove astro Use the "factory data reset" (on 2.2 its under Privacy) Power up and check it's greeting you as a new user Power off Remove sim card Power up and check it does even less Power off & send
Perform a factory reset then write to the memory and reset again. This is the best way I have found to prevent data remnance.
I was aware that with a magnetic based drive there is almost always data remnanace. I believe the standard to effectively erase info on a magnetic drive is erasing and re-writing over the drive 7-20 times (don't quote me on those number). I was under the impression that once you erased data from flash storage it was gone for good but recalled the story of a woman finding porn on her refurbished Evo. So, I asked about data remnance at Superuser on flash memory and found that data sometimes can remain after it is deleted. The recommendation there was: formatting, writing to the memory and formatting again.
To format, as the answers above suggested, I performed a factory reset. This can be done one of two ways on the Droid:
- Go to the "Settings" menu, choose "Privacy" then choose "Factory Data Reset"
- Do a hard reset
Ultimately I just did the Factory Reset because I was too lazy to load the system memory up and I suspect that 99.99% the Factory Reset is sufficient, but it's good to know what the risks are.